Film Forum

U.S., 1981
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen
Based on the story by George Lucas, Philip Kaufman
Approx. 115 min. DCP.

"Don’t look at it, no matter what happens!" Harrison Ford’s archeology professor Dr. Jones is on the hunt for the face-melting Ark of the Covenant, but will he get there before Hitler’s Nazi thugs? Winner of 5 Academy Awards®, and the first Lucas-Spielberg collaboration.

Reviews

“The first — and best — of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’ Indiana Jones trilogy is a Saturday matinee B movie writ large, which pays tongue-in-cheek homage to the cliff-hanging serials of yesteryear… Filled with nonstop thrills and hyperkinetic action, death-defying stunts and eye-popping special effects, the comic strip-style violence (including melting flesh and grisly corpses) is… perfect escapist entertainment for teens, and Harrison Ford is a perfect hero.”
– Leonard Maltin, Leonard Maltin’s Family Film Guide

“A MASTERWORK OF ACTION-ADVENTURE.”
– CommonSenseMedia.org

“An out-of-body experience, a movie of glorious imagination and breakneck speed that grabs you in the first shot, hurtles you through a series of incredible adventures, and deposits you back in reality two hours later — breathless, dizzy, wrung-out, and with a silly grin on your face. A swashbuckling adventure epic in the tradition of STAR WARS, SUPERMAN, the James Bond pictures, and all the other multimillion-dollar special-effects extravaganzas. It wants only to entertain. It succeeds.”
– Roger Ebert