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The Lost Weekend
Don Birnam, a long-time alcoholic, has been sober for ten days and appears to be over the worst… but his craving has just become more insidious. Evading a country weekend planned by his brother and girlfriend, he begins a four-day bender that just might be his last – one way or another.
28 August 1895, Glenlohane, Kanturk, County Cork, Ireland
May 17, 1875 in New York City, New York, USA
April 8, 1875 in Preßburg, Austria-Hungary [now Bratislava, Slovakia]
5 January 1906, North Carolina, USA
21 February 1880, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
January 27, 1896 in Ballinamore, County Leitrim, Ireland
28 October 1899, New York City, New York, USA
February 17, 1908 in New York City, New York, USA
15 May 1923, Detroit, Michigan, USA
March 21, 1894 in New York City, New York, USA
September 27, 1893 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA
June 21, 1893 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
January 2, 1889 in Lima, Ohio, USA
21 March 1896, Texas, USA
10 February 1910, Princeton, Illinois, USA
4 July 1904, Massachusetts, USA
17 February 1910, Palisades, New Jersey, USA
July 15, 1907 in Anaheim, California, USA
9 October 1887, Oslo, Norway
February 21, 1893 in Fort Smith, Arkansas, USA
January 13, 2014
Despite the grim subject matter, there are glimpses of Wilder's characteristic mordant wit, and the director's location work in New York's Third Avenue district is exemplary. Casting the hitherto bland Milland was a stroke of genius.
February 19, 2013
Although ultimately less bleak than Charles Jackson's autobiographical novel, the film is uncompromising in its depiction of the lies, self-deception and degradation that alcoholism leads to.
February 09, 2006
What makes the film so gripping is the brilliance with which Wilder uses John F Seitz's camerawork to range from an unvarnished portrait of New York brutally stripped of all glamour.
September 14, 2012
While you watch it, it entirely holds you.
March 13, 2016
Dry alkies and wet teetotalers perpetually out of balance, startlingly laid out by Wilder as a lonely metropolis' quivering nervous system
February 19, 2013
Taken as a treatise on addiction generally, it's remarkably sensitive and thoughtful.
February 17, 2009
Director Billy Wilder's technique of photographing Third Avenue in the grey morning sunlight with a concealed camera to keep the crowds from being self-conscious gives this sequence the shock of reality.
February 19, 2013
One of cinema's earliest and best portraits of drug addiction.
May 20, 2003
A shatteringly realistic and morbidly fascinating film.
February 20, 2008
It is intense, morbid -- and thrilling. Here is an intelligent dissection of one of society's most rampant evils.
February 23, 2012
Under Wilder's imaginative direction, Milland has been able to convey just what an uncontrollable craving for liquor does to a man's mind, his body and soul.
December 12, 2006
Today it's less impressive but not without its virtues.