Greetings (1968)

Greetings is the kind of scrappy, alive New York comedy that feels like you’ve stumbled into a late-’60s conversation and can’t stop listening—sharp, restless, and mischievously funny. Brian De Palma turns draft anxiety, conspiracy chatter, and sexual curiosity into satire with an inventive, anything-goes energy, capturing a historical moment without embalming it. There’s real charm in watching three friends spar and scheme as the culture shifts under their feet, and it’s a treat to spot an early Robert De Niro before the legend fully crystallized. If you want tidy storytelling or modern sensibilities, it may feel rough around the edges, but if you like comedy with bite and a time-capsule buzz, it’s absolutely worth your time.

Greetings is clearly trying to bottle late-’60s New York anxiety into a loose, talky comedy about draft-dodging, sex, paranoia, and the era’s cultural obsessions. The problem is it plays more like a string of sketches than a real movie, with uneven pacing and jokes that can feel dated or simply not sharp enough to justify how long some bits linger. The low-budget, rough-around-the-edges vibe can be charming if you like scrappy counterculture cinema, but it also reads as amateurish and unfocused if you’re expecting polished satire or a cohesive story. If you’re into time-capsule weirdness and early, anything-goes experimentation, you might find it interesting; if you want consistent laughs and narrative momentum, this will test your patience.