lasttimeisaw Malle's Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner and hence successfully procured 5 Oscar nominations in 1982, the Big Five (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Script) but lost all of them. The opening voyeuristic gaze towards a young Susan Sarandon's bare breasts is a brazen invitation to a tale of lust and passion, but when it reveals its beholder is a weather-beaten codger, an ethical uneasiness has been motivated on the subject matter as a knee-jerking response, a December-may obsession has its intrinsic inclination to prompt its viewers with polarized acceptance. Luckily, Burt Lancaster is spry and self-aware as the pip-squeak, who sends off a dignity-ballasted aplomb even when he is dictated by his old flame for money, and Malle and screenwriter John Guare mercifully glistens his twilight years with a belated opportunity to spice up his low-end life, and the ending is a tad out of left field but also understandable with its benevolent gesture to a sympathetic soul. This is authentically Ms. Sarandon's big breakthrough role, a simple girl always on-the-make and striving for a better life (getting married with a sad sack to get out of a provincial town, taking croupier class to secure a job in the casino), not that Oscar-worthy in my opinion, but she is a natural performer to oscillates between spitfire honesty and self-serving shrewdness; by contrast, Lancaster's Oscar-nomination is more deserving, merely a cipher would be left unnoticed at the shady corner of casino shindig, finally pays his dues to save a lady and revitalize his own life, though Sarandon's sexual allure is the precondition, Malle and Guare carefully skirt around the prickly issue by injecting a more acceptable closure of their relationship. Kate Reid, as garish as she is in the role of an aging silk-stocking widow, embellishes the film with her own way of levity (the ineffable expression when Lancaster cops a feel in her bed) while other supporting cast is purely bells and whistles. I cannot say this is Malle's apotheosis, my favorite among his oeuvre (so far) is still THE FIRE WITHIN (1963, 9/10), nevertheless Atlantic CITY never loses its zest in spinning a yarn for the aged generation, and it is also a sensible elegy to those who dies without fulfilling their dreams, it is never too late to shoot a few mobsters!

rauldiul This is a fun movie. The cast is great, the story has a bit of everything: wit, emotion, love, action... and the pace is just right.What makes it all "fit" in a way is the "Atlantic City atmosphere". It just works to glue it all together (helped of course by the great direction). And when all the parts in a film click together, good quality cinema is always made.It's actually really hard to create a movie about an old man who goes back to his "gangster" life and succeed in making it believable. There are funny moments, there are nervous and sad moments, this movie entertains.Why should we ask more of it? Anyone could enjoy this film. I'm surprised it doesn't have many ratings.

Rodrigo Amaro There are actors that seem to be born to make great roles like the one played by Burt Lancaster in this film. A likable, charming, quite enigmatic but very friendly man named Lou Pascal, a old resident of Atlantic City who gets with his neighbor (Susan Sarandon) after the murder of her husband, Dave (Robert Joy), whom Lou recently met and started a business that might complicate the lives of everyone involved with him. Louis Malles's "Atlantic City" is a reminder that cities can be reborn and people's lives can do the same too as long as they know how to find each other in this complicated and dangerous world. The author of this is famous play-writer John Guare of the famous play "Six Degrees of Separation" and in this film we are reminded through the whole experience about the connections of life and how they work sometimes for good things, other times for bad things. And the city is constantly presented as a different place than in its older days, everything's being demolished (including the place where the main characters live) where new casinos will be made.Lou is a sad figure in the beginning, his mob days are over and now he's taking care of old lady (Kate Reid), wife of a old friend of his, and she keeps bothering this guy all the time, ringing his bell wherever she needs him. His resurrection will appear when he mets Dave and starts doing some drug dealing business that will give him a lot of money and also show to himself that life can be good again. And there's his close relation with Dave's wife, first watching her at distance while she baths herself with lemons (the beautiful opening scene); and then helping her after Dave's death. Destiny will prepare some surprises to these characters in this magnificent place called Atlantic City.The plot is easy to follow, very simple and very absorbing, very good written (the sequence of Dave's death is one of the most planned moments in film history with a thrilling chase through a car elevator). And the acting? The best possible! Lancaster and Sarandon have a great chemistry on screen, and like I said he was born to perform this role, can't imagine other actor playing. Sadly, it lost out all the five big awards in which was nominated for the Oscar, but at least, it built a enormous reputation within its audience and critics making one of the best films ever made in 1980's, a true cult film. Along with "Adieu Mon Enfants" (1987) this is Malle's best work in that decade and one of his finest. Watch it now if you can. 10/10

HelloTexas11 'Atlantic City' draws its two main characters so well, and they are so well acted by Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, that it is only at the end that we feel let down for caring about two people who frankly don't deserve it. There are points in this finely directed and well-written film where we think something wonderful (or tragic) will happen to them, that they've gotten a lucky break which will enable them to break free from their shallow dreams (or perhaps go down in flames), but in the end, they go right on living like they did before, albeit with a little more money. I daresay everyone on the planet has known someone like Sarandon's Sally, a young woman struggling to make it who's already been through a bad marriage and hard times and is trying to start over. She's pretty but not gorgeous, energetic; she's also foolish, a little crazy, and emotionally unstable to a degree. Sally is training to be a casino dealer, a career she almost blindly hopes will solve all her problems and maybe even allow her to live in France. She approaches the training with all the fervor of someone who's been talked into a pyramid scheme. But just below the almost manic surface, one can tell she is bound to burn out on the idea sooner or later. She never gets the chance though. Burt Lancaster is Lou Pascal, a former mobster (so he says) who hasn't been outside of Atlantic City in twenty-seven years, even though there is nothing for him there anymore, if in fact there ever really was. He is reduced to taking fifty-cent bets from people, mostly tenement dwellers in the poor black community. His companion of sorts is Grace, a woman about his age who, like him, lives in a past that frankly doesn't sound like it's much worth reliving. He waits on her, gets her groceries and does other errands for no particularly good reason other than he's been doing it so long, it's become a habit. They argue a lot but seem to feel genuine affection for each other. Atlantic City itself is shown in the early days of the casino boom, where there are two kinds of people: those like Sally who are going to work in the casinos, and those like Lou and Grace who are being pushed aside to make room for the glitzy gambling dens. The old run-down hotels are being torn down. Lou lives in a shabby room in one of them, as does Sally next door, though they don't know each at first. Lou finds himself unexpectedly making big money dealing cocaine (inadvertently courtesy of Sally's ex-husband) and begins playing the high-roller he always wanted to be, and pretends that he once was. But he really does have a heart, and he tries to help and 'protect' Sally. As a quirky slice-of-life, 'Atlantic City' hits almost all the right notes. But as a satisfying drama/character study, it leaves us hanging with an 'is that all there is?' kind of feeling. The thing about the ending isn't that it's such a huge downer, but that it is neither here nor there. We half-expect Lou to die trying to help Sally, or Sally to come to the realization she's been used and that learning French really isn't the answer. Instead, Sally steals most of the drug money from Lou and takes off down the road, none the wiser as far as can be told. And Lou goes back to Grace; the last shot is of them walking down the boardwalk, apparently content to be back where they started. It's more depressing than a genuinely depressing ending.