It's aggressively sexual without being sexy. Russell wants to paint the kinky stuff as ugly and insipid, but he sensationalizes it anyway.

| Original Score: C | Dec 2, 2022

Crimes of Passion is a brilliant film painfully revealing the fine line people tread between fantasy and reality, using sex as the modus operandi.

| Jul 8, 2022

Except for the performance of Kathleen Turner... "Crimes of Passion" goes beyond the unbearable into the execrable: an artistic netherworld where terminal boredom, utter silliness and mind-boggling perversity coexist.

| Jun 23, 2021

Ken Russell fancies himself an artiste, and his odious pretentions take all the fun out of it.

| Jun 23, 2021

Russell deals in extremes, and this film goes further than any American film I know of in its exploration of eroticism and sexual relationships. It's a don't-miss movie.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 23, 2021

It's not coy, but it's not real, either. The characters don't talk to each other, they spout bad, pompous dialogue.

| Jun 23, 2021

Turner's performance is intriguing - now we know that she can play not only a sexpot (Body Heat) but a sexpot hiding in a career woman's suit-and-tie and posing as a fleshpot. This is pretty interesting.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 23, 2021

Well acted, a little ingenuine, but dramatically effective.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 23, 2021

Turner acts if she's auditioning for some loopy Mae West impersonation contest. Eyes wide and nostrils flaring, she looks like a doe caught in the glare of a hunter's headlights. Perkins is her perfect body double.

| Jun 23, 2021

It remains steamy, sordid, grim and utterly fascinating, but it is not a movie to be taken lightly.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 23, 2021

Turner's choice of parts and the depth of her submersion into them indicates that she means business and is willing to do what she thinks it will take to fill the bill for whatever role.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 23, 2021

"Crimes of Passion" was obviously trimmed to avoid an X rating. Too bad the entire movie wasn't left on the cutting room floor.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jun 23, 2021

It holds your attention, all right, but Russell's intentionally self-defeating manner (the film only exists to make fun of itself) seems pretty pointless here.

| Jun 23, 2021

For all its flaws - and it has many - Crimes Of Passion is a vibrant and unforgettable film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 23, 2021

Amid Hollywood products pasteurized from demographics and screening groups, the idiosyncratic vision of Ken Russell is a refreshing breath of foul air.

| Jan 3, 2018

An extraordinary sensory experience... it becomes more like an Expressionist depiction of sex than a straightforward realist narrative.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 15, 2017

The divine madness of Ken Russell is in full bloom here.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 5, 2008

It plays out as a cheesy and shrill satire on America's sexual mores.

| Original Score: C | Jan 17, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 25, 2007

There are lapses, but this is in the main a comedy so black that it recaptures some of the cinema's long-lost power to shock.

| Jun 24, 2006