Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Mabel Munoz Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

jarrodmcdonald-1 Some reviewers have complained that PETULIA is a bit of a downer-- that it is a little too depressing to watch. But this movie is not supposed to make you feel good...it's supposed to make you think about life and relationships. Lead actress Julie Christie is superb as always and so is her costar, George C. Scott. In a supporting role, Richard Chamberlain adds an interesting element to the proceedings, as does Joseph Cotten in an extended cameo as his father. The film's jagged time line keeps its viewer on tenterhooks, wondering where Julie Christie's character will end up in this story about post-traumatic stress and recovery. Great, provocative cinema.

maryszd Petulia opens with a shot of a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair, then cuts to a sixties' rock club featuring a very young-looking Janis Joplin. The sixties counterculture definitely torpedoed middle-aged women. Their husbands, like Archie, the middle-aged doctor played by George G. Scott, have the luxury of deciding they're "tired" of being married and jumping into affairs with younger women. This is a cause of continuing sadness to his ex-wife Polo, wonderfully played by Shirley Knight. Archie becomes involved with Petulia (Julie Christie), a clichéd "kooky" young woman of a type that often appeared in films of this period. Petulia is married to an abusive, wealthy husband, David, played with suitable evil by Richard Chamerlain. Christie is such a good actress that she gives some dimension to the role, although she's far outshone by Knight as Polo, the wounded wife. In its technique and attitude it really is a European or British film shot in San Francisco with American actors. There are interesting cultural references to the sixties, that may have seemed daring at the time, but now seem more innocent than anything else. The film is really about Archie and men of his generation and their bewilderment at the changing cultural mores represented by Petulia. On one hand they're delighted to feel that they can have sex with no responsibilities, but Petulia, for all her charm brings nothing but chaos into Archie's life. Was it really worth for him to be involved with her? And he ends up stuck with a high maintenance greenhouse in his apartment.

thinker1691 The 1960's were years of radical change, deliberate rebellion and outright discarding of many rules. This film called " Petulia " is one example of the deception of established but hidden lifestyles. It tells the story of Petulia Danner (Julie Christie) a young, fashionable, but very married woman with an extremely 'kookie' attitude to life. The inner burden she carries is difficult to reveal, so she masks it with a facade of erratic behavior. Among the various quirks she tries is attracting the attention of Archie Bollen (George C. Scott), a concerned doctor on the downside of a marriage. Interested, Bollen tries to understand Miss Danner, while adjusting his own life to the on-going divorce, the loss of his own kids and the knowledge that Patulia's jealous husband (Richard Chamberlain) is a rage-filled, physically abusive, spoiled rich man. Learning that Mr. Danner attacked and nearly killed his wife, Bollen must decided what to do with the on-going abuse. With a menagerie of 60's style rock bands and hippie, flower-child backgrounds, director Richard Lester, paints the movie with the addition of several cameo actors like Arthur Hill, Joseph Cotton, Howard Hesseman and Austin Pendleton. This is one film written by John Haase and Lawrence Marcos which well defines the sixties. ***

BrentCarleton Julie Christie parades her proletariat pout through 2 hours of psychedelic pretensions, all of which are seemingly supposed to suggest great profundity and hidden meaning--but don't be fooled--this is an empty parcel wrapped in glittering paper, with a core as resoundingly vacuous as the society it attempts to depict.The story, (such as it is) concerns a chic young woman (Miss Christie as "Petulia") who picks up children and middle aged men with casual indifference to convention, because she's "kooky" (recall that our anti-heroine here inherits this voguish characteristic from her cinematic sisters in "Georgy Girl," "Darling" and anything with Sandy Duncan). The reason for this, to which the story eventually arrives, but which it anticipates with frequent visual flashbacks, lies in an unhappy marriage with wealthy pretty boy Richard Chamberlin.In this instance, Petulia's latest adult male conquest is a recently divorced physician, (George C. Scott) with whom she commits adultery, between kooky capers (installing a greenhouse in a residential urban apartment, shopping out the store in an all night grocery etc.) and pronouncements such as "I think I've just found the cure for cancer".Amid the kookiness, and in order to assure us that this is all to be taken in deadly earnest, the story includes an incident in which Petulia is hospitalized after sustaining multiple lacerations in Mr. Scott's apartment. This sequence replete with ambulance runs, and much blood is designed to arouse sympathy for any in the audience who haven't yet warmed to our anti-heroine, who also turns out to be expecting a baby.Mr. Scott wears an expression throughout the film suggesting the worst case of indigestion in history, (and by the way it's the only expression he wears) and one wonders if his dissatisfaction is with the script or the character.In any case, he's unsympathetic, not the least of which is because his ex-wife is portrayed by the exquisitely lovely Shirley Knight of the golden blonde hair and guileless cornflower blue eyes. Her performance, so dead on target, saves the film, in at least those sequences in which she appears.Along the way, every visual cliché in the book is thrown in at some point including protesting hippies, daisy covered vans, strobe lit discotheques, and rock bands. The faddish choppy editing through which these scenes appear fleetingly is about as subtle as a sledge hammer.If the point of this cinematic charade is that modern society is filled with poseurs, then "Darling" from three years earlier made the same point much better. In this case, "Petulia" is the poseur par excellence.