Has a permanent place amongst the classics, not only for the performances but for Tennessee Williams' raw writing about people raw with pain, fear, longing and complicated feelings
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02/20/09
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
98
%
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Reviews Counted:46
Fresh:45
Rotten:1
Average Rating:8.5/10
Synopsis: Tennessee Williams based his screenplay on Oscar Saul's adaptation of Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play set in a grimy New Orleans project. The story of the fragile sentimentalism of a former... [More]
Starring: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
Director: Elia Kazan
Reviews for A Streetcar Named Desire
Top CriticBetween them Kasan, Brando and Leigh take all the blood, sweat and tears of Williams' text and create one of the most potent productions of the post-war years.
11/14/08
Top CriticThe blistering sexual repression is the entire point of the 1950s. Quite simply, fabulous.
11/14/08
Top CriticThe film is perhaps best regarded as an intelligent and engaged recreation of the original Broadway experience, in which Jessica Tandy first played the role. There's no denying the awful horror and pity of the final scene.
11/14/08
Top Criticit's a close-to-definitive example of how to make a great play work on film, for all the very slight air of Hollywood compromise.
11/14/08
Simply a masterful adap of Tennessee Williams' sultry, searing play and an affirmation of Marlon Brando's acting genius.
11/14/08
There's an inevitable staginess to Tennessee Williams' devastating portrait of delusion and cruelty, but director Elia Kazan catches the squalid, claustrophobic atmosphere of a New Orleans tenement just right.
11/14/08
No review available.
11/04/07
One of the most potent productions of the post-war years.
11/01/07
Top CriticClick to read the article
11/01/07
A Streetcar Named Desire features some of the finest ensemble acting ever offered on the screen, speaking some Williams's most vivid dialogue.
06/28/07
Top Critic...if the hothouse style was ever justified, this is the occasion.
06/28/07
The classic adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, featuring one of Marlon Brando's legendary performances.
01/27/07
That melancholy we feel as it closes is a mourning for me that I'll never be able to see this film again for the first time--and that I'll never be able to appreciate any film that came before it without the stain of it in my perception.
06/15/06
Brando pulls off astonishing things as Stanley Kowalski, and Vivien Leigh gives a performance that must have taken everything she had as Blanche DuBois.
05/26/06
Brando's performance is probably the most influential in movie history for the way its raw naturalism smolders amid the stiff theatricality that surrounds him.
05/05/06
Streetcar should have been Vivien Leigh's picture, she's the main character, but it's Brando who steals every scene he's in.
04/27/06
This is a film about passion, and the movie positively oozes it.
04/10/06
...Kazan achieves a sort of theatrical intensity in which the sweaty realism sometimes clashes awkwardly with the stylisation that heightens the dialogue into a kind of poetry.
02/09/06
With The Glass Menagerie, one of the best Tennesee Williams film adaptations.
09/28/05
Latest News for A Streetcar Named Desire
August 12, 2008:
Taylor Hackford Revisits Tennessee Williams' Early Years 
Taylor Hackford has signed on to direct Tenn, a Robin Shushan-scripted drama about the formative years of playwright Tennessee Williams. More...
June 22, 2007:
AFI Announces Top 100 Movies of All Time ... Again
Ten years ago the AFI gave us a list of the Top 100 American Films Ever Made -- and when that was done they churned out 15 other lists every few years. And then last night they... More...
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