Saturday Night Fever 30th Anniversary Collectors Edition (1977)

USA Today
"...Among the definitive time-capsule pics of any era....It looks and sounds snappy..." 10/11/2002 p.7E

Entertainment Weekly
"...Travolta melds brute machismo and hidden yearning; it's little surprise FEVER made him a superstar and earned him an Oscar nomination..." 10/18/2002 p.95

Premiere
"[G]iven a subtle sweetness and vulnerability by Travolta's layered performance." 04/01/2004 p.58

Uncut
4 stars out of 5 -- "[The film] still plays like an impossibly bleak slice of kitchen-sink realism..." 11/01/2007 p.152

Empire
4 stars out of 5 -- "[Travolta] pure, chest-out charisma. The camera loves him -- and he loves it right back." 11/01/2007 p.202

Ultimate DVD
4 stars out of 5 -- "[A] mesmerizing portrait from Travolta ensures it stays evergreen." 12/01/2007 p.95

FilmCritic.com 7 of 10
Time and the selectiveness of memory has recorded Saturday Night Fever as a fun romp about disco and little more. Check out the reviews online -- they talk about how great the Bee Gees music is, John Travolta's dance moves, his hairdo, and his Brooklyn swagger...When Tony's dancing, Saturday Night Fever is a true dance classic that puts its contemporaries to shame. But when the melodrama thickens -- notably during the last 40 or so minutes of the film -- SNF approaches unwatchability, as what ought to be a precious little film starts to take itself way too seriously...While Fran Drescher has a tiny role, you won't recognize any of the names of Tony's co-stars -- namely because they just weren't that great as actors. Travolta, of course, is fantastic (maybe for the only time in his career). His ad-libbing about his hair alone is enough to merit remembering SNF as a classic. - Christopher Null
 
Chicago Sun-Times 9 of 10
"Saturday Night Fever" is an especially hard-edged case and a very good movie. It's about a bunch of Brooklyn kids who aren't exactly delinquents but are fearsomely tough and cynical and raise a lot of hell on Saturday nights...The Brooklyn we see in "Saturday Night Fever" reminds us a lot of New York's Little Italy as Martin Scorsese saw it in "Who's That Knocking at My Door?" and "Mean Streets." The characters are similar: They have few aims or ambitions and little hope of breaking out to the larger world of success -- a world symbolized for them by Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Bridge reaching out powerfully toward it...But "Saturday Night Fever" isn't as serious as the Scorsese films. It does, after all, have almost wall-to-wall music in it...And there are the funny scenes (like the one where Travolta shouts at his father: "You hit my hair!") to balance the tragic and self-destructive ones...There's also a hint of "Rocky," whose poster Travolta's character has on his bedroom wall. Travolta meets a Brooklyn girl (Karen Gorney) who's made it in Manhattan, sort of, as a secretary. She comes back to Brooklyn to dance, and they team up to enter a $500 disco contest. They win it, too, but not before winning has become meaningless to Travolta. Their relationship is interesting because Travolta sees Miss Gorney not so much as a girl (although he thinks she's beautiful) but as an example of how he might escape Brooklyn...The movie's musical and dancing sequences are dazzling. Travolta and Miss Gorney are great together, and Travolta does one solo (in an unbroken shot) that the audiences cheered for. The movie was directed by John Badham ("The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars"), and his camera occupies the dance floor so well that we really do understand the lure of the disco world, for all of the emptiness and cruelty the characters find there. - Roger Ebert
 
Apollo Movie Guide 8 of 10
Lost amidst all the hoopla and now-legendary disco stuff is the fact that John Badham's Saturday Night Fever is actually an effectively gritty and somewhat touching New Yawk drama. Sure, it's no Mean Streets, but there's clearly a lot more here than just a lot of colourful dance floors, swivelling hips and Bee-Gees...John Travolta is (of course) Tony Manero, fitful Italian upstart and reigning king of the Brooklyn disco scene. Tony's talents on the dance floor are superseded solely by his dreams of escape. Living in his family's house (and always under the shadow of his adored priest of a big brother) and seemingly well aware of the fleeting nature of local fame, Tony (despite his urbane manner and 'deese dose' speech patterns) simply wants to evolve into 'something'...For the time being, that something will have to be disco dancing, and make no mistake: Tony (and his real-life counterpart Travolta) knows how to dance. Lording over the late-night discos like an unassuming monarch, Tony takes great pride in his boogieing prowess...Other than the famously influential dancing material (and the omnipresent soundtrack songs), there's not a whole lot that's stunningly unique about Saturday Night Fever. The 'angry young man' material's been covered numerous times before, but in earlier cases, the protagonist often ends up in jail, on drugs, or laden with bullet holes. The message here may be a little simple, but it's delivered with a strong performance by Travolta, a screenplay that only occasionally wanders into outright melodrama, and the hip-swinging-est, bell-bottom-est dance moves ever captured just prior to disco's welcome demise...Some movies don't stand the test of time because they simply become outdated. Saturday Night Fever is the very epitome of 'outdated', but oddly enough that's what makes it such a (mini) classic. - Scott Weinberg