Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Nonureva Really Surprised!

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Maleeha Vincent It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

muons This is a 2 hr movie carrying no more information or message than you'd find on a 30 sec news footage about road rage.

adrian-43767 It would always have been a tough call to do a 90-minute movie on such exiguous material, both in terms of script and equipment: basically a massive tanker truck and a small car. Given that just about the entire 90 minutes are on the road, one who knows anything about trucks knows that the menacing old jallopy of a tanker truck could never pump up to the speeds it appears to be doing in the movie. In reality, the central character, played by Dennis Weaver, should have put many miles between the two vehicles in no time, thus leaving the menace trailing in the dust and looking for opposition more its own speed and size.If you manage to overcome that hurdle in terms of believability, you have to wonder why Weaver keeps applying brakes, veering off the road, getting all rattled, and violating all manner of safe driving rules, often upon seeing the tanker truck in the rearview mirror. And, as if that were not questionable enough, twice he runs in the hope of catching up to the dastardly truck, as if he could catch up on two legs and businessman shoes!... and what about his fear that causes him to go all nervous upon sight of the truck, does it disappear miraculously when he is away from his own car and apparently even more vulnerable?Let me say without any hesitation that the character played by Weaver is not blessed with a high IQ. Quite the contrary, he decides to get into a phone booth standing in the middle of poisonous snakes and tarantulas while the truck is speeding up in his direction - and, needless to say, flattens the booth, snakes et all. The script is necessarily squalid, a monologue for the most part, and not a particularly exciting one at that. Camera work deserves plaudits for making the most of bare bones and Weaver's acting is competent and relatively convincing, once you've accepted that he is not the brightest spark around.You never get to see the truck driver, only his arm, very briefly, waving to Weaver to overtake, but he is a nasty villain obviously determined to prevent Weaver reaching his business meeting in time, to bother Weaver all he can, to place Weaver in harm's way, and, ultimately, to kill him. And it is in this frantic and obsessive attempt to kill that you realize that the truck driver's IQ is as low as his intended victim's, or he would have stopped the truck before rolling down the hill.Despite glaring flaws, DUEL is a much copied work and its influence can be seen in movies such as LES PASSAGERS (France, 1977, with Jean-Louis Trintignant) and BREAKDOWN (US 1997, with Kurt Russel), among others.It also helped launch Spielberg's career as director and he, like the film, has had ups and downs in terms of quality, from the lofty heights of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, to the depths of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, among others. 6/10 for Spielberg's honorable debut at age 22, and courage in taking up such a potentially un-filmable project as DUEL.

julesfdelorme I'm coming back to my Halloween theme on Horror films that don't seem, at first glance to be Horror films. I think that nothing represents this kind of movie better than Steven Spielberg's first film, Duel. A TV movie starring Dennis Weaver (Of McCloud fame), Duel was pretty much the result of a TV Network throwing Spielberg a bone for winning an award for a Night Gallery episode, or maybe just because he survived working with Joan Crawford. It was meant to be just another TV movie of the week. And it was nothing more than that in North America. But French critics, including Francois Truffault were so impressed with the movie that it was a successful theatrical release in Europe. Duel has the production value of a 70s TV Movie, but it still manages to be much more than that. First, it was preview of what Spielberg was capable of as a director. And second it is a superb monster movie. You wouldn't know it from the premise. Duel is the story of a somewhat weak willed motorist who finds himself pursued by a truck after he passes it on the highway. He doesn't even cut the truck off. And that's part of the key to this being a very good horror movie. The Antagonist operates without reason and seems to be utterly relentless. You never see the trucker. You see a hint of boots and an arm, but you never see a man. As he will do so well later in Jaws, Spielberg makes the unseen and unknown create the tension and the fear in our minds. Because we never see the trucker Weaver's character is pursued by a machine, not a human being. Even Pauline Kael gave the movie a great review. And she would go on to blame Spielberg, along with George Lucas for ruining American film. Her particular prejudice, that small films are important, and big budget films are mindless, would be echoed by far too many people, particularly when it came to Steven Spielberg. He didn't just become a great film maker when he made Schindler's List and Finding Private Ryan. Jaws is a superb film. One of the greatest horror films of all time. It put beaches out of business. And Duel, despite being intended as a cheap TV movie, is far better than it might seem on the surface. What Spielberg was able to do with so little is an indication of how great a director he was even then. It's a creepy, nerve wrenching monster movie that draws you in to its odd premise scene by scene. It's original and it's so much better than it was meant to be. It's well worth the watch, especially just before Halloween. If you haven't seen Duel, I would highly recommend it. Even if you watch it just as a curiosity, just as Spielberg's earliest work, I think you'll be surprised at how much of the film mastery that we would see in Spielberg's later work already present in Duel. And you may not want to drive on a lonely highway for a little while after that.#movies #film #filmcritique #horrorfilm #duel #stevenspielberg

rodrig58 In my opinion, this "Duel" is Steven Spielberg's most Hitchcockian movie. Simple, effective, with great talent, using actors who are not celebrities - they are not even known - he manages to make a film that does not let you get bored at all, you follow it with much interest from start until the end. After 46 years from my first view, I really enjoyed it again. Best film of Dennis "McCloud" Weaver and one of Spielberg's best. Pure suspense. But with an original Spielberg brand. Very much appreciated how it is filmed and how it is edited.