Continue with Google
>
More
Certified fresh picks
New TV Tonight
View AllMost Popular TV on RT
-
I Will Find You: Season 1
65% -
Widow's Bay: Season 1
98% -
House of the Dragon: Season 3
91% -
Sugar: Season 2
97% -
From: Season 4
96% -
Spider-Noir: Season 1
92% -
The Boroughs: Season 1
96% -
The Agency: Season 2
92% -
Cape Fear: Season 1
75% -
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed: Season 1
93%
More
Certified fresh pick
Columns
Guides
-
Essential Survival Movies Ranked by Tomatometer
Link to Essential Survival Movies Ranked by Tomatometer -
Best New Action Movies of 2026
Link to Best New Action Movies of 2026
Hubs
-
Awards Tour
Link to Awards Tour -
What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming
Link to What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming
RT News
-
Weekend Box Office: Street Fighter Delivers a Knockout
Link to Weekend Box Office: Street Fighter Delivers a Knockout -
How Street Fighter (1994) Created One of the Strangest Cult Fighting Game Characters
Link to How Street Fighter (1994) Created One of the Strangest Cult Fighting Game Characters
The Lost Weekend Reviews
More than 70 years after its initial release, the movie still mesmerises the audience with its performances, painting probably the most heartfelt and realistic picture of someone battling an alcohol addiction.
Billy Wilder shows why he is one of the all-time great directors and screenwriters with one intense and desperate moment after the next. Filled with acerbic and biting dialogue, Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett’s script is among the best of its time.
It displays with pitiless realism the humiliation, the degradation and the horror experienced by an alcoholic.
Mr. Jackson's novel is not a masterpiece, but it is a brilliant experiment; and the team of Brackett and Wilder, co-writers and respectively, producer and director, have made of it a film which is often brilliant.
The whole thing is short on imaginative resonance; what it has is the Brackett-and-Wilder specialty -- a distinctive cruel (and sometimes cruelly funny) edge.
As a subject for discussion, it's the film of the year. It is cinematically speaking, a brilliant achievement, with two sequences standing out as high points of film horror, on a strict realistic basis.
Worthwhile films are many. Merely passable ones too many. But extraordinarily fine films produced in a year can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Lost Weekend would take up three fingers In any given annum. It's that good.
Something rare and wonderful happened when they made this picture. It's extraordinary, to say the least, when Hollywood drops its rose colored glasses for honest story treatment. It's the first time that Hollywood ever produced a drunk who isn't funny.
The Lost Week End is magnificent melodrama, a serious study into a disease which too often is delineated in ridiculous guise, and an absorbing attempt to show the misery of drink.
If Ray Milland doesn't get the Academy Award for his work in The Lost Week-end it will be a miscarriage of justice.
Jane Wyman, who plays Don's troubled sweetheart, is a revelation in her first dramatic role after her unbroken succession of featherweight comedy parts.
[Ray Milland] has imbued the very soul of the agonized man and in his portrayal Milland hits his peak. This is by far his best performance to date and one by which he’ll undoubtedly measure his future roles.
Much credit is due the Wilder-Brackett team for their skillful handling of the drama. There is sledge-hammer directness and ugly simplicity that make it outstanding.
From an artistic point of view, this drama is impressive, for the direction and the acting are of the highest order. But it is hardly the type of entertainment that motion picture-goers want to see today, for it is grim and depressing.
In the book, words slip into crevices too small for the camera to enter. Words describe aspects and nuances of the human mind that are too minute for the broader medium of movies. Nevertheless the result is a good brave try, surprisingly achieved.
It is frank; it is well made; it is uncompromising, in the sense that it holds that a drunkard's dream is a sufficient theme for dramatists. But to my taste it is just dull.
No artist has ever done with brush and oils what Mr. Billy Wilder, the director, does with his camera in The Lost Weekend. His three-dimensional portrait of Don Birman seems to multiply the three dimensions by several more.
The Lost Weekend has power, suspense, intelligence and a performance by Ray Milland which unquestionably will rate him serious consideration for the 1945 Academy award.
Too often, a film critic finds it necessary to scold, condemn, belittle and decry pictures made in the United States. It is a rare and deep pleasure to be able to say, as in this instance. "Well done, Hollywood."
Too much can't be said for Mr. Milland's performance. Seldom has the screen seen anything comparable.