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As for Coppola and his world, it's difficult to say whether his film is successful or not. That's the beautiful thing about a lot of the new, experimental American directors, they'd rather do interesting things and make provocative observations than try to outflank John Ford on his way to the Great American Movie.

Never very popular by comparison with Easy Rider probably because it suggested that dropping out was mere escapism, it has far greater depth and complexity to its curious admixture of feminist tract and pure thriller.

The vocabulary of film, with its subliminal grammar is even more susceptible to corruption than mere words. And Coppola, one of the most technically proficient of the new directors, proves himself, once again, a master of the visual cliche. [25 Sep 1969, p.55]

[Coppola] has made a relentlessly good-looking, accurate-feeling movie without the patronizing paranoia toward the American heartland and its natives that is so much in fashion these days.

Intense and affecting. [24 Jun 1990, p.67]

A journey by car that becomes a journey into the inner self, Wild Strawberries played a crucial role in creating what is now thought of as an American genre, the Road Movie. [11 Jun 1995, p.12]

The movie races all over the place in a hurry to illuminate the "little people" who live in quiet desperation. It's a bit too noisy for that, and yet there is enough about it to warrant attention.

Writer-director Francis Coppola, scrutinizing the flight of a neurotic young woman and her efforts to assist a brain-damaged ex-football player, has developed an overlong, brooding film incorporating some excellent photography. Often lingering too long on detail to build effects, he manages to lose character sympathy.

Like its main character, the movie hits the road with no final destination in mind, and the manic inventiveness that sustains the early passages becomes strained and weird by the end.

There's a prodigious amount of talent in Francis Ford Coppola's unusual, little-seen film, but it's a ponderously self-conscious effort; the writer-director applies his film craftsmanship with undue solemnity to material that suggests a gifted college student's imitation of early Tennessee Williams. The result is academic, and never believable.