Metacritic reviews

Its truly unnerving quality is that its existence is a brutal reminder from the past that homosexuality is not heterosexuality, and that any attempt to reconcile the difference will only breed resentment, confusion, and violence. Or perhaps it will only lead to more lame Hallmark movies of the week like Brokeback Mountain.

One of the most original thrillers of the 1980s. It's a lurid, twisted film that brings you into its world and completely works you over.

Here's a movie that's well visualized, that does a riveting job of exploring an authentic subculture, that has a fairly high level of genuine suspense from beginning to end. . and that then seems to make a conscious decision not to declare itself on its central subject. What does Friedkin finally think his movie is about?

In its shameless excavation and exploitation of the killer-queen archetype–the homosexual so riddled with self-loathing and guilt that they feel an insatiable urge to kill and punish others–the film is bad politics and dodgy, flawed filmmaking, but it's weirdly resonant and thoroughly haunting all the same.

Recouping this one amounts to nothing more than taking part in a Friedkin vanity project. Cruising has been freshly dug up for a new generation of luckily clueless viewers; but, as we know, children shouldn’t play with dead things.

The structure continues to loosen, and although Friedkin - like Coppola - has always had difficulty with endings, this one is so arbitrary it's as if he just gave up.

Cruising is more of an exploitation effort as opposed to a genuine mind-bender. The film concentrates on the gay underground in New York City, although Friedkin's take on a sexually charged mystery is more funny than challenging

What's left is the framework for a graphic, brutal, sickening film (1980), without the violent effects that might have made sense (however illegitimate) out of the conception. Like The Exorcist, it alternates five minutes of shock with ten minutes of dull exposition, plenty of time to watch Al Pacino wrestle with his miserably conceived character.

Viewers are spared nothing as Steve Burns undergoes degrading brutality after brutality; virtually nobody is portrayed sympathetically.

Like any approach to the bizarre, it is fascinating for about 15 minutes. In many respects, Cruising [from the novel by Gerald Walker] resembles the worst of the ‘hippie’ films of the 1960s. Taking away the kissing, caressing and a few bloody killings, Friedkin has no story, though picture pretends to be a murder mystery combined with a study of Al Pacino’s psychological degradation.