Synopsis
An account of the revolutionary years of the legendary American journalist John Reed, who shared his adventurous professional life with his radical commitment to the socialist revolution in Russia, his dream of spreading its principles among the members of the American working class, and his troubled romantic relationship with the writer Louise Bryant.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Warren BeattyJohn Reed
- Diane KeatonLouise Bryant
- Edward HerrmannMax Eastman
- Jerzy KosińskiGrigory Zinoviev
- Jack NicholsonEugene O'Neill
- Paul SorvinoLouis Fraina
- Maureen StapletonEmma Goldman
- Nicolas CosterPaul Trullinger
- M. Emmet WalshSpeaker at Liberal Club
- Ian WolfeMr. Partlow
Recommendations
- 100
The New York Times
Reds is an extraordinary film, a big romantic adventure movie, the best since David Lean's ''Lawrence of Arabia,'' as well as a commercial movie with a rare sense of history. - 100
Rolling Stone
Not since Lawrence of Arabia has there been a serious historical movie of this sweep, complexity and intelligence. - 100
Chicago Reader
Warren Beatty's shapely 1981 epic, based on the life of radical journalist John Reed, is a stunningly successful application of a novelistic aesthetic—a film that makes full and thoughtful use of its three-and-a-half-hour length to develop characters, ideas, and motifs with a depth seldom seen in movies. - 100
Washington Post
Warren Beatty's Reds is an extraordinary picture. Three hours and 19 minutes long, it is occasionally rambling and repetitious, but nearly always intelligent and engrossing. - 91
The A.V. Club
It’s a stylistic throwback as well: an old-fashioned, star-studded, big-budget historical epic with an intermission, filmed in a classical style that hearkens back in some ways to David Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. - 90
The Guardian
An engrossing, beautifully filmed and remarkably balanced portrait of a fascinating moment in history, cleverly enhanced by the intercutting of real-life documentary interviews. Reds is everything a historian could want in a movie. - 88
Chicago Sun-Times
As for Beatty, Reds is his bravura turn. He got the idea, nurtured it for a decade, found the financing, wrote most of the script, produced, and directed and starred and still found enough artistic detachment to make his Reed into a flawed, fascinating enigma instead of a boring archetypal hero. I liked this movie. I felt a real fondness for it. - 75
Slant Magazine
Reds is finally just an appealingly conventional epic movie-star romance with radical trimmings, but it contains several sharper elements that suggest the colorful period it seeks to recreate.
