Metacritic reviews

Schrader doesn't speak to the deeper and more human themes he's introduced. Too bad. But Hardcore, flawed and uneven, contains moments of pure revelation.

Hardcore never gives in to the rhythm of its nighttime world, never swoons; Mr. Schrader doesn't seem capable of the perversely rhapsodic style his subject demands. But he does work with speed and intelligence, paying sharp attention to detail and making the movie as funny as it is quick and frightening.

The easily shocked may want an expose, or more a condemnation. The more sophisticated may grow tired of Scott’s morality. But shocked, cynical or dissatisfied, nobody’s going to be bored.

Whatever its flaws, this is one of very few American films to deal with fundamentalist beliefs about predestination, faith, and sin with empathy and intellectual acuity.

Schrader's second feature, Hardcore, is more confidently made than his first, Blue Collar, but it slips into a similar category: absorbing but unsatisfying. [10 Feb 1979, p.C1]

The action meanders around to a hackneyed end, and because Hardcore is softcore, it doesn't convincingly convey that climate of self-hatred which pervades the sexual ghetto.

It's a detached, opaque, affectionless movie; since it doesn't regard the young prostitutes as human, there's no horror in their dehumanization--only frigid sensationalism.

For all its neon-lit expressionism and portentous, dread-inspiring music, Hardcore has almost nothing to say about its subject. Schrader doesn't explore any moral conflict, he just gives off attitudes - and banal, shopworn attitudes at that. [13 Feb 1979, p.57]

On the most rudimentary levels - basic believability and coherent exposition - Hardcore is a joke without a punch line. [03 Mar 1979]