This exercise in bad taste is the Dawn of the Dead of nymphomania. Never mean-spirited, A Dirty Shame has some big laughs, but it's a one-joke movie that shows its strain well before the finish line.

| Mar 13, 2018

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 7, 2008

Waters has made a resolutely unsexy sex comedy, but he hasn't left out the comedy.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 30, 2007

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2006

No shame here.

| Original Score: B | Nov 18, 2005

Exploring the wide divide between prudes and the world of sexual excess, there's enough bad taste on display to shock, amuse and entertain. Sizzles when hot, fizzles when not

| Aug 30, 2005

A Dirty Shame is a fabulously funny exploration of fetishism, a look at the ever-more-insane ways people find to 'get off'.

| Original Score: 93/100 | Aug 22, 2005

Wow. The challenges of reviewing an NC-17 movie for a family newspaper are, um, challenging.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 9, 2005

More a return to roots than a return to form, this messy carnal-concussion comedy celebrates the libido and every form of sexual practice

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 31, 2005

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 5, 2005

A Dirty Shame is not a good movie, but it has a good message, and for that, it's well worth seeing.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 11, 2005

Outrageous, filthy and often hysterically funny, this is John Waters' best film since Serial Mom.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 30, 2005

John Waters takes on the decency brigade with a social comedy that's a refreshing return to his unhinged filmmaking style.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 29, 2005

The NC-17 rating and the images of Selma Blair with her gargantuan bosom seemed to promise a return to form - if Waters were going dirty again, how could he disappoint?

| Apr 23, 2005

A Dirty Shame is outrageous for the sake of being outrageous, but unlike some of Waters' other films, it's neither shocking nor funny.

| Original Score: D- | Apr 14, 2005

The filmic equivalent of a child reading aloud the Dictionary of Filth with the express intent of giving his nanny a heart attack.

| Apr 1, 2005

Goes through the surface motions of naughtiness, [but] it all comes off rather quaint in the end.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 5, 2004

It's a marked improvement over his misguided Cecil B. Demented (2000), but falls a bit short of Pecker (1998) as the most entertaining Waters film since 1988's Hairspray.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 29, 2004

What's really astounding is that A Dirty Shame actually is shocking and depraved.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 7, 2004

A genuine cri de couer in the director's long-running battle against the forces of censorship and a banal societal (and cinematic) status quo.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 19, 2004