62
Metascore
14 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- It's to director Hal Ashby's credit that he succeeds in maintaining an unsettling tone of pre-Lynchian absurdism throughout, while also pulling the viewer into a touching love story between perhaps the most unlikely couple in cinema history.
- 80The A.V. ClubScott TobiasThe A.V. ClubScott TobiasIn the end, Harold And Maude metes out these life lessons directly and without much ambiguity, yet that does little to diminish its power.
- 80IGNIGNYou may find yourself passing a very enjoyable couple of hours with the oddest of odd couples.
- 75TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazineThis is a doggedly eccentric film which some will reject out of hand. Others will find it profoundly moving and life affirming.
- 75Slant MagazineSlant MagazineThe effortless depiction of their growing camaraderie and unconscious courtship is one of Harold and Maude‘s great charms, as Ashby and screenwriter Colin Higgins transpose fading ideology into boundless truth across a modest framework of pitch-black exposition and glowingly pastoral aesthetic touches.
- 60Time OutTime OutAshby forever treads the thin line between whimsy and absurdity and tough sentimentality and black comedy. It is most successful when it keeps to the tone of an insane fairystory set up at the beginning of the movie.
- 50Chicago ReaderDave KehrChicago ReaderDave KehrHal Ashby's 1972 cult film may be simpleminded, but it's fairly inoffensive, at least until Ashby lingers over the concentration-camp serial number tattooed on Gordon's arm. Some things are beyond the reach of whimsy.
- 38Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertHarold is death, Maude life, and they manage to make the two seem so similar that life's hardly worth the extra bother. The visual style makes everyone look fresh from the Wax Museum, and all the movie lacks is a lot of day-old gardenias and lilies and roses in the lobby, filling the place with a cloying sweet smell.
- 30The New York TimesVincent CanbyThe New York TimesVincent CanbyAs performers, they both are so aggressive, so creepy and off‐putting, that Harold and Maude are obviously made for each other, a point the movie itself refuses to recognize with a twist ending that betrays, I think, its life‐affirming pre tensions.