repellent little film' that 'cannot rise above the world it pretends to examine'. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four, writing that the first 40 minutes 'crackle with excitement', but then 'the pace slows down considerably, the nudity tires and the growing attraction of Fox for Jagger is unprepared for'. Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote that the film was suggestive of 'Mickey Spillane trying to write like Harold Pinter' and that filmmakers Cammell and Roeg had done a 'fundamentally rotten' job, regularly 'upstaging the action and the actors with tricky (and often unintelligible) sound recording and 'striking' composition. Oddly enough, they may have stumbled into a cult hit.' Richard Schickel of Life described the film as 'the most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing'. By way of contrast, Jan Dawson of The Monthly Film Bulletin called it 'the kind of brilliant, baffling film about which it would be marginally more easy to write a book than a review ... though visually dazzling, wittily and literately scripted, and brilliantly conceived, the film inevitably derives much of its strength from its performers, nearly all of whom achieve a near-symbiotic relationship with their roles'. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Performance gradually acquired a cult following on the late night and repertory cinema circuits. By the 1990s, it had undergone a critical reappraisal. The film has become canonised by many theorists of British cinema, who have suggested it is iconic within the British gangster genre. This is primarily due to its reflection of the coexistence of the criminal world of the East End and the bohemian culture in London during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1995, Performance appeared at number 30 in a Time Out 'all-time greats' poll of critics and directors. After Cammell's death in 1996, the film's reputation grew still further. It is often cited as a classic of British cinema. In the September–October 2009 issue of Film Comment, Jagger's Turner was voted the best performance by a musician in a film. In his 15-hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins says: Performance was not only the greatest seventies film about identity; if any movie in the whole Story of Film should be compulsory viewing for film makers, maybe this is it.'Performance holds an 85% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on