Budd Wilkins Slant Magazine Mar 4, 2025

The film remains a beguiling time capsule—sensual, cerebral, both ode to and threnody for a very specific time and place.

Go to Full Review

Matt Brunson Film Frenzy Mar 2, 2025 2.5/4

It’s easy to see why Performance has both attracted and offended.

Go to Full Review

Eve Tushnet Patheos Sep 18, 2023

Unfortunately the film is mostly about the gangster, who lacks Jagger’s charisma and generally is no fun. And then the self-consciously disorienting style makes it even harder to care about what is happening.

Go to Full Review

Adam Nayman The Ringer Nov 26, 2018

Critics hated it, and Warner Bros. barely saw fit to release it, but Performance has endured as a cult favorite. It's also arguably the greatest-ever big-screen showcase for Jagger...

Go to Full Review

Sean Axmaker Stream on Demand Nov 25, 2018

... this collision of London gangster machismo and drug culture, where "Nothing is true; everything is permitted," is unmistakably a product of the sixties.

Go to Full Review

Kate Muir The Times (UK) Jul 23, 2015 4/5

With a pleasurably peculiar cast of James Fox, Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, Performance is one of the weirdest slices of Seventies London around, combining gangster violence and ritual humiliation with decaying rock-star glamour.

Go to Full Review

Keith Phipps The Dissolve Apr 7, 2014 4.5/5

For all its hallucinatory excesses, however, Performance is a film of ideas, even if it's happier to let them swirl around than attempt to explain them.

Go to Full Review

Jay Cocks TIME Magazine Mar 25, 2013

Pop stars continue to have bad luck in films.

Go to Full Review

J. Hoberman Village Voice Mar 25, 2013

The movie is a facile enough pastiche of underground pyrotechnics and Euro-art pretensions, but far more evocative now is the fast, offhand repartee between the principals.

Go to Full Review

David Sterritt Christian Science Monitor Mar 25, 2013 4/4

It put Roeg's powerful cinematic style on the cultural map for the first time.

Go to Full Review

Dave Kehr Chicago Reader Mar 25, 2013

Rapture and boredom both seem valid responses.

Go to Full Review

Cole Smithey ColeSmithey.com Apr 18, 2011 A+

[VIDEO] "Performance" pioneered a slew of modern cinematic techniques adopted by such master filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, and Gaspar No.

Go to Full Review

Donald J. Levit ReelTalk Movie Reviews Aug 19, 2010

Comes across as pretentious in spots but has not lost its '60s hallucinogenic suggestiveness. It haunts like the dream just out of reach of the rational concrete.

Go to Full Review

Fernando F. Croce CinePassion Mar 15, 2010

A grand Borgesian hall of mirrors

Go to Full Review

Jennie Kermode Eye for Film Jun 26, 2009 4.5/5

It's not so much a linear story of one man's adventures as an enquiry into the nature of performance, gender and the very structure of society.

Go to Full Review

Pablo Villaça Cinema em Cena Apr 10, 2009 4/5

Em sua estria como ator, Jagger surpreende pela intensidade e expressividade, ao passo que Fox, um intrprete j consagrado poca, impressiona pela coragem em protagonizar um filme que retratou como poucos a insanidade da Londres daquele perodo.

Go to Full Review

Emanuel Levy EmanuelLevy.Com Sep 21, 2008 B

A strangely mesmerizing, innovative film whose artistic stature has increased largely due to its absorbing look at British crime and art worlds circa 1968, and riveting turns by Mick Jagger and James Foxx who exchange personalities in this tale.

Go to Full Review

Walter Chaw Film Freak Central Apr 26, 2007 3.5/4

We were always building monuments to our power and we always will be--performance is just one avenue to that same old immortality.

Go to Full Review

Chris Barsanti Filmcritic.com Feb 27, 2007 3.5/5

The last half of the film is sheer nonsense, and less interesting nonsense than that which preceded it

Go to Full Review

Rumsey Taylor Not Coming to a Theater Near You Feb 13, 2007

The film is such a variety of aural and visual tactics that Performance is something to see, even if its immense viscera leaves little aftertaste.

Go to Full Review