“The film’s two most famous set pieces are fabulous … Sorcerer endures in part as a document of filmmakers triumphing over the elements right along with their characters.”

Adam Nayman, Cinema Scope

In the decade since William Friedkin’s film maudit Sorcerer was restored and re-released in movie theatres, its reputation has shifted. Once an emblem of New Hollywood hubris—both a financial failure and an overdetermined refashioning of a classic—today it’s more likely to be appreciated as a Herzog-rivalling feat of production realism. Sorcerer, a remake of Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear made possible by the success of The French Connection and The Exorcist, opens with four prologues of fate that introduce its cast of desperate men: a Mexican assassin (Francisco Rabal), a Palestinian militant (Amidou), a French banker wanted for fraud (Bruno Cremer), and an American gangster (Roy Scheider). After they’re hired to drive dynamite as a flammable ticket out of their luckless situations, the abyss that threatens to swallow each man grows wider, manifesting most memorably in the form of a suspension bridge unravelling over a raging river. Tangerine Dream provides the score.

In English, French, and Arabic with English subtitles

“Friedkin’s characters may not have much to show afterward, but Friedkin does: the lost gem, the rediscovered masterwork, the evidence that the guy everyone thought had lost it was right all along.”

Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice
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