Accident is nasty fun -- a fascinating, rather preposterous movie, uneven, unsatisfying, but with virtuoso passages of calculated meanness.

| Sep 19, 2023

Pinter conveys this progressive, irreversible disaster with words, and Mr. Losey conveys it with precise pictorial correlatives. The two men make an exceptionally gifted and intelligent team, and I hope they will go on working together for a long time.

| Aug 15, 2022

The subtle, controlled performances of the principal actors make this work.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 3, 2018

The whole thing is such a teapot tempest, and it is so assiduously underplayed that it is neither strong drama nor stinging satire. It is just a sad little story of a wistful don.

| Mar 12, 2015

Dirk Bogarde's crumbling don is the sharpest of the many similar performances he has given, and Stanley Baker is superbly chunky as Bogarde's rival for a young Austrian student (Jacqueline Sassard).

| Mar 12, 2015

A sharp and complex British film that his by turns witty and engaging.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 12, 2015

Of Losey's three collaborations with Pinter (the other two are 1963's The Servant and 1970's The Go-Between), it is the most challenging and influential.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 12, 2015

The film's didactic indifference also makes it unclear whether Stephen ups the ante or gets his comeuppance in the end.

| Jun 12, 2014

Bring a date, because you'll need to talk this one through.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 20, 2014

Losey and Pinter locate the pain that lurks deep within complacency, and the film positively throbs with it. It's an old idea, perhaps. But in their hands it hurts anew.

| May 20, 2014

A firstrate cast is headed by Bogarde, who wins sympathy for his superficially cold character, and his contained way with emotion is superbly right. But the main acting surprise is contributed by Stanley Baker.

| Feb 23, 2012

An eerie, caustic, surgically calm film about the skull beneath the skin of genteel English life.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 5, 2009

'Accident' now seems a little self-conscious in its modernist, 'quality' art-cinema pretensions.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 5, 2009

It's a story of overheated sexual jealousy, colliding male egos and long boozy days full of spite and point-scoring. It's brilliantly cruel and only slightly dated.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 5, 2009

I personally think Losey's The Servant is the more interesting film, because it has the more interesting performance from Bogarde.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 5, 2009

The overall effect is so full of loathing and meanness that one hardly cares for those subliminal tremors, and the arch structuring of the story - the accident, then the long flashback - makes it dramatically inert.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 5, 2009