Metacritic reviews

Too many classic set pieces to mention but keep your ears cocked for that immortal line "Mmmm, Juicy Fruit." Certified brilliance.

A masterpiece. (9 Jan 1998, p.3D)

Brilliant cinema theatre.

Playing the mental-hospital firebrand who rebels against monstrous Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), Nicholson seduces in an anti-establishment classic with a gut-punch exit.

Here is the bruised-plum role that put Jack Nicholson into the biggest of big leagues.

With One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Forman takes his rightful place as one of our most creative young directors. His casting is inspired, his sense of milieu is assured, and he could probably wring Academy Award performances from a stone.

Jarring and electrifying drama.

So good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance.

This slick and entertaining 1975 film of Ken Kesey's cult novel will inevitably disappoint admirers of director Milos Forman's earlier work.

A comedy that can't quite support its tragic conclusion, which is too schematic to be honestly moving, but it is acted with such a sense of life that one responds to its demonstration of humanity if not to its programmed metaphors.