The film was well-received by film critics.
Rex Reed of the
New York Daily News said, "
Heat is the most important film to ever emerge from the tropic underground movement, providing freshness and excitement in a dreary Cannes Film Festival to which the establishment has brought large doses of irrelevance and tedium."
Derek Malcolm of
The Guardian called it "one of the very best things" at the Venice Film Festival. "It succeeds in being both funny and sad, and effortlessly truthful too," he said. The advert for the film was censored in the
Daily News with a t-shirt painted on Dallesandro and a bra strap on Miles. Her performance garnered positive reviews, with
Judith Crist, writing in
New York magazine, "The most striking performance, in large part non-performance, comes from the late Andrea Feldman, as the flat-voiced, freaked-out daughter, a mass of
psychotic confusion, infantile and heart-breaking." In a review for the
Los Angeles Times,
Kevin Thomas described
Heat as a "captivating but too drawnout parody of
Sunset Boulevard crossed with
Where Love Has Gone." He added, that the film "rings true at its core; it's around the edges that indulges in self-defeating spoofery and sexploitation." Jerry Stein of
The Cincinnati Post described the film as "an unexpectedly cold, harsh comedy in its lack of compassion." ==See also==