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
Network Reviews
Whether Network meant to or not, it prepared audiences for a new kind of journalism. One where the anchor isn’t pretending to be neutral anymore. One where outrage replaces reporting.
One generation’s satire is another’s reality, meaning that the outrageous antics on view in Network would hardly be out of place in a TV landscape that in the modern era has housed Bill Reilly, Howard Stern, and Fear Factor.
Presenting this kind of absurdity with even a whiff of knowing, tongue-in-cheek self-awareness would have neutered its desired sting, so it’s all played with straight faces for the duration.
Lumet keeps the pace up throughout his marvellously edited film, with the actors - three of whom won Oscars - doing stellar work, remaining utterly believable even at their most absurd and verbose.
If there’s one role that epitomizes all that Chayefsky found simultaneously seductive and horrific about the medium of television it was that of Diana, magnificently brought to scathing life by Dunaway. It’s her best screen work...
Sidney Lumet's Network remains a startlingly relevant & wildly compelling masterpiece, featuring marvelous performances from the entire ensemble and a brilliant, Oscar-winning screenplay from the incredible Paddy Chayefsky.
‘…a classic film that never gets old, you can apply this story’s logic to everything from Susan Boyle to Baby Reindeer, where innocents are exploited by corporate ‘hobgoglins’ and sacrificed on the altar of cash…’
Half a century later, Sidney Lumet’s Network remains a darkly humorous and relevant treatise on capitalism’s erosion of morality.
The film is as vicious and feeble as a wasp trapped in the jam it craves, and if Network is essential viewing it is because of this chronic confusion.
Network is good, strong stuff. Fine performances enhance a meaningful script.
Network acted as a troubling warning of where we were heading when it came to media, populist messages, commercialism, sensationalism and corporate dominance over all those fields. Perhaps we should have listened.
Sidney Lumet's quick-paced direction feels remarkably fresh nearly half a century later. It also says something powerful about the state of the media today. And with their pointed personalities, the charismatic performances still zing.
Everything about the movie is thrilling and flawless.
Like John Updike, Chayevsky and Lumet are here giving us Memories of the Ford Administration -- only they weren’t memories at the time. This was America as it was happening, suicidal ideations born of a scotch hangover, beamed live into every home.
The film looks negligently made; the lighting bleaches the actors' faces, like color TV that needs tuning, and the New York views outside feel like blown-up photographs.
“Network” is both a highly entertaining drama with lots of laugh-out-loud humor and a film that carries some very timely messages, ones that are extremely prescient in modern times.
Its awfully entertaining, thanks to the self-conscious theatrics of Paddy Chayefsky, the terrific performances, and Lumets steady eye keeping the real world in perspective as the circus comes to town and stays.
In the war between cinema and television, Network remains an atomic bomb.
...an erratically-paced yet periodically spellbinding drama...
[Network] is one of the most ferocious, outspoken, and generally cynical attacks ever launched by one medium upon another, and on the society that shapes and harbors them both. Fortunately... the assault Is often as entertaining as it is savage.