cars, hairstyles, and fashion, there's really no telling when the movie actually takes place." Observing that much has changed about the city since the film's initial release, Macdonald concluded that The Fabulous Baker Boys serves as "a time capsule, for Seattle and for me ... Seattle and I aren't the same anymore, but 'The Fabulous Baker Boys' — elegantly and forever frozen in time — reminds us of who we were." Film Threat credited Ballhaus's cinematography with "mak[ing] Seattle as alive as the characters, as active as their desires", whereas Jack walking through Seattle represents "the feeling of an entire city, of everyone doing whatever they do, and the sun rises, and sets, and the cycle continues, the same cycle for others as it is for Jack." Identifying Kloves as an heir to New Hollywood directors Bob Rafelson or Peter Bogdanovich, Paula Vazquez Prieto of La Nación described The Fabulous Baker Boys as the director's attempt to "revitalize the memory of jazz repertoire musicals, the appeal of those characters on the margins of fame, the melancholy of a city like Seattle, the value of the story in the heart of the mainstream." Slant Magazine'''s Chuck Bowen considers the film to be a lesser-known example of the film noir genre due to its depiction of "dream worlds that offer portraits of estrangement and economic frustration", in which Seattle "is rendered ... as a surreal realm that appears to have been ported in nearly unchanged from the backlots of the thrillers and studio musicals of the 1930s and 1940s." Similarly, Stefan Milne of the Seattle Metropolitan wrote that the film resembles "1940s Hollywood romance and glamour" despite its 1980s setting. Describing The Fabulous Baker Boys as potentially "the loneliest mainstream American movie since In a Lonely Place", Bowen credits the director with "fashioning something that's conscious of its artistic heritage without scanning as self-conscious, like most neo-noirs. This is the key to the film's considerable emotional pull, as you're allowed to give yourself over to the narrative's purplish pathos without feeling as if you're being set up for an elaborate, ironic joke". The critic likened some of Kloves's dialogue to classic Hollywood films Mildred Pierce (1945) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Release Box office Prior to its release, the film received significant press for the idea of Pfeiffer playing a former sex worker and the novelty of the Bridges brothers portraying