SummaryA photographer is trapped in Cambodia during tyrant Pol Pot's bloody "Year Zero" cleansing campaign, which claimed the lives of two million "undesirable" civilians.
Directed By:Roland Joffé
Written By:Bruce Robinson
The Killing Fields
Metascore
Generally Favorable
76
User score
Generally Favorable
7.3
My Score
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Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
76
83% Positive
15 Reviews
15 Reviews
11% Mixed
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
6% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
100
A powerful, gut-wrenching film that ranks in the top of the 1984 product. [19 Nov 1984]
90
The most powerful study of the Vietnam era since "Apocalypse Now"...Roland Joffe's direction is gripping, unflagging, if sometimes ragged. But the flaws strengthen the film, give it a more realistic edge, which truly reflects the time and captures the joy of forgiveness and friendship refound. [18 Jan 1985, p.25]
90
The Killing Fields is the best movie about journalism since "All the President's Men," re-creating with an understated ease the atmosphere of the poolside bonhomie of the correspondents, the mechanics of getting and filing a story, and the moral quandaries of a reporter's professional detachment.
83
Gripping, intelligent, provocative drama...Incisively directed by newcomer Roland Joffe, although the story sags in spots and the beginning is draggy.
80
A solid, stark, cheerless rendering of hard-boiled storytelling. It’s historical filmmaking at its most candid and its most pragmatic.
70
A story of perseverance and survival in hell on earth, The Killing Fields represents an admirable, if not entirely successful, attempt to bring alive to the world film audience the horror story that is the recent history of Cambodia.
30
The low point is a New York sequence in which Waterston puts some Puccini on his stereo, pops his personal (custom-made?) videocassette of Cambodian atrocities into his video recorder, and goes into a heavy voice-over recounting the crimes of Amerika. Didacticism doesn't get much cruder than this, yet the emphasis of the sequence is on Waterston's exquisitely tortured conscience—it's there to demonstrate the profound, compassionate depths of his humanity.
User Reviews
User score
Generally Favorable
7.3
80% Positive
16 Ratings
16 Ratings
10% Mixed
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
10% Negative
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
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Production Company:
- Goldcrest Films International
- International Film Investors
- Enigma Productions
Release Date:Feb 1, 1985
Duration:2 h 21 m
Rating:R
Tagline:He was a reporter for the New York Times whose coverage of the Cambodian War would win him a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. But the friend who made it possible was half the world away with his life in great danger... This is the story of war and friendship, the anguish of a country and of one man's will to live.
Awards
Academy Awards, USA
• 3 Wins & 7 Nominations
Golden Globes, USA
• 1 Win & 6 Nominations
BAFTA Awards
• 8 Wins & 13 Nominations
