Metacritic reviews

The director gives us a small, sincere and nearly perfectly realized film about adolescence in Oklahoma, aptly entitled The Outsiders. [24 Mar 1983]

Francis Coppola's revision of his 1983 film of S.E. Hinton's best seller The Outsiders is funny, touching and revelatory, with twenty-two minutes of added footage and a new soundtrack featuring Elvis Presley. [Review of re-release]

The charismatic Dillon is a believable delinquent and gets solid support from a cast that went on to populate some of the better youth pictures in years to come. [Review of re-release]

Coppola's teenagers seem trapped inside too many layers of storytelling.

Francis Coppola has made a well acted and crafted but highly conventional film out of S.E. Hinton's popular youth novel, The Outsiders.

As a movie, it's mediocre.

This is an honestly moving, ungainly film. [25 Mar 1983]

Alas, The Outsiders is not quite a good one. Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama.

It is spectacularly out of touch, a laughably earnest attempt to impose heroic attitudes on some nice, small characters purloined from a ''young-adult'' novel by S.E. Hinton, the woman who wrote the novel on which ''Tex'' was based.

Francis Ford Coppola's gang film is as moony about death as "One From the Heart" was over romance; the film is unremitting in its morbid sentimentality, running its teenage characters through a masochistic gamut of beatings, killings, burnings, and suicides.