Release Upon its release in 1971 some European film boards/classifications such as Germany gave the film an "X" rating for its harsh and realistic view of drug use and violence and it was banned completely in the UK until 1974. Many of these boards' decisions were made due to aspects of these films that were not necessarily pornographic, as was the case with other significant works such as Hodges's Get Carter, Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Kubrick's Clockwork Orange (all from 1971) and Boorman's Deliverance (1972). The early 1970s are therefore often cited to be the significant phase of X-rated movies that were not necessarily pornographic. The Panic in Needle Park marked Al Pacino's first starring feature film role, although it was neither his nor Kitty Winn's feature film debut, as the studio notes and some reviews erroneously reported. It was Raul Julia's first feature film. Home media The film was released on Blu-ray through Twilight Time on June 14, 2016 in their usual limitation to producing only 3,000 copies. Reception On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 80% based on 15 reviews, with a weighted average of 7.2/10. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that "the movie lives and moves. It is not filled with quick cutting or gimmicky editing, but Jerry Schatzberg's direction is so confident that we cover the ground effortlessly. We meet the characters, we get to know the world. Especially, we get to know this relationship between Bobby and Helen, and thank God the filmmakers were tasteful enough not to kill them off at the end just because that's so fashionable these days." Roger Greenspun of The New York Times stated in a more mixed review that the film "vacillates between expressive slice-of-life and some of the less durable minor conventions of big-city melodrama." Arthur D. Murphy of Variety lauded the film as "a total triumph. Gritty, gutsy, compelling, and vivid to the point of revulsion yet so artistically perfect one cannot look away, it is an overpowering tragedy about urban drug addiction." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two stars out of four and wrote, "Despite its many closeups of needles puncturing veins, 'Panic' is little more than a traditional love story set in New York's West Side drug culture ... The film is neither an especially interesting drama nor