Barfly

Henry Chinaski is a poet who spends his days drinking in a run-down part of Los Angeles, moving through a routine of writing, drinking and brawling that regularly gets him thrown out of the Golden Horn, his regular bar. When he meets Wanda, a woman who drinks as heavily as he does, the two form a bond that neither money nor respectability has any part in. The film follows their attempts to keep going together on the margins of society.

The screenplay was written by Charles Bukowski, drawn from his own semi-autobiographical writing, and the director is Barbet Schroeder. Barfly was the first of the nine features Schroeder directed, ahead of Reversal of Fortune, Single White Female and later films such as Our Lady of the Assassins and Amnesia. Mickey Rourke plays Henry and Faye Dunaway plays Wanda, with Alice Krige, Jack Nance, J.C. Quinn and Frank Stallone Jr. among the credited cast of thirty-seven. The production, backed by Cannon Group, Golan-Globus Productions and American Zoetrope, had a budget of about 3 million dollars and took in roughly the same amount worldwide.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.1 from around 23,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.9 from roughly 400. A critics' rating of 6.9 from 25 reviews puts it close to the audience scores on both platforms, suggesting broadly similar levels of appreciation rather than a sharp split between reviewers and viewers.