Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
An account of the revolutionary years of the legendary American journalist John Reed, who shared his adventurous professional life with his radical commitment to the socialist revolution in Russia, his dream of spreading its principles among the members of the American working class, and his troubled romantic relationship with the writer Louise Bryant.
Reds is an ambitious, sprawling epic that blends docudrama innovation—real-life 'witnesses' interspersed throughout—with a grand romantic and political narrative. Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton deliver career-best performances, anchoring a three-hour film that never loses its human core amid the sweep of revolutionary history. The witness interviews are genuinely novel for a Hollywood production of this scale, giving the film a distinctive texture. The cinematography by Vittorio Storaro is handsome but occasionally conventional for the period. The ending, while emotionally resonant and historically faithful, loses some momentum in its final stretch, feeling somewhat deflated compared to the film's electrifying middle passages.