Movie · 1981 · Drama, History, Romance · 3h 15m · PG · English
Curator score: 8.0/10 (52.4K ratings)
Not since Gone with the Wind has there been a great romantic epic like it!
Overview
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.
Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Edward Herrmann, Jerzy Kosiński, Jack Nicholson, Paul Sorvino, Maureen Stapleton, Nicolas Coster, M. Emmet Walsh, Ian Wolfe, Bessie Love, MacIntyre Dixon, Pat Starr, Eleanor D. Wilson, Max Wright, George Plimpton, Harry Ditson, Leigh Curran, Kathryn Grody, Brenda Currin
Curator Review
Verdict
An ambitious, unusually earnest historical epic that fuses revolutionary politics with a sweeping romance. It’s long, talky, and occasionally unwieldy, but the scale, performances, and visual confidence make it a standout for viewers who like their period dramas big-hearted and intellectually engaged.
Best for
fans of political epics and historical dramas
viewers who enjoy romance intertwined with ideology
people interested in early 20th-century history and revolution
audiences who appreciate long-form, novelistic filmmaking
fans of performance-driven prestige cinema
Skip if
you want a brisk or tightly plotted film
you dislike politically charged period pieces
you prefer romance without heavy historical context
you’re impatient with 3-hour runtimes or digressive structure
Overview
Reds is the kind of studio-era gamble that feels almost impossible in hindsight: a mainstream American film built around socialism, journalism, and a doomed love affair, staged with enormous confidence. It treats history as something lived through bodies, arguments, and desire rather than as a lecture, which gives the movie a surprising emotional immediacy even when the politics get dense.
Worth noting
What makes it work is the tension between scale and intimacy. The revolution is always present, but the movie keeps returning to the messy human cost of commitment: ambition, jealousy, compromise, and the need to be witnessed. That balance gives the film its charge, and it’s why the long runtime feels less like a burden than a slow accumulation of meaning.
Bottom line
It’s not perfectly even, and some viewers will find its structure sprawling or its political drama secondary to the romance. But the craftsmanship is formidable, the performances are vivid, and the film has a rare sense of conviction. It’s a serious, romantic, and unusually alive piece of Hollywood filmmaking.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Patrick Willems (4.5★) · 1319 likes
Beatty going "hey for my second movie as a director I'm gonna get Stephen Sondheim and Vittorio Storaro and make a 3-hour epic about communists" is a truly baller move
Wilson (5★) · 594 likes
Warren Beatty's Reds has to be considered perhaps the most ambitious, frankly crazy, film released by mainstream Hollywood. It is, in 1981, a sympathetic, if critical, look at the 1917 Russian Revolution. The film focuses on the life and career of John Reed, the journalist and writer who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. It mixes the personal and the political, spending a good deal of time looking at Reed's relationship with Louise Bryant (the amazing Diane Keaton, more… more Warren Beatty's Reds has to be considered perhaps the most ambitious, frankly crazy, film released by mainstream Hollywood. It is, in 1981, a sympathetic, if critical, look at the 1917 Russian Revolution. The film focuses on the life and career of John Reed, the journalist and writer who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. It mixes the personal and the political, spending a good deal of time looking at Reed's relationship with Louise Bryant (the amazing Diane Keaton, more… more
matt lynch (4★) · 501 likes
Imagine if these folks had Twitter or had to listen to Chapo or something.
Harrison (4★) · 459 likes
this was made while REAGAN WAS PRESIDENT
warren beatty is an absolute baller
Will Sloan (4★) · 427 likes
The epic story of two ethical non-monogamists who quickly discover that some things work better in theory than practice. John Reed is the patron saint of leftist content creators who are bad at organizing.
This is a rock-solid movie (I’m not gonna waste your time on that, you know why it’s good - Beatty, Storaro, Nicholson, etc etc), and obviously it’s cool and impressive that Beatty had the clout to get Paramount to spend 32 million in 1981 dollars on… more