"Another circle, in which a somnambulist Lee Marvin, furious but somehow immaterial, strides and beats his way around a cell of supporting actors, demanding to be let in. John Boorman's first American picture is still his best film, influenced by Resnais and maybe by Borges, but wildly excited by American sleaze, cars, glass elevators, penthouses, bars, sex and violence, and by that poignant abandoned studio, Alcatraz. Point Blank can be read as a vengeance story: the wronged outlaw survives San Francisco Bay and gets his $93,000 back. Except that, at the end, he doesn't risk opening the passage. Is he still there? Was he ever there? Or is the entire film a loser's dream of success as he fades out of life in a cell on the derelict Alcatraz?
"Lee Marvin acts on the principle that we need know very little about a movie character to feel his force. Marvin creates need, image and power by denial and defiance of explanation. He is as flat, arbitrary and thunderous as the screen. But all around him, the movie crawls with worried plausibility--from Carroll O'Connor's strutting loudmouth to the quiet authority of James Sikking's Oswald-look-alike assassin. And Angie Dickinson has no equal as the essential sexual nonentity in a sleepwalker's story of imagined glory." David Thomson