Even while nailing a specific period in time, it’s still able to transcend its setting and speak directly to modern folks who no longer find aesthetic pleasure in impossibly long sideburns.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 5, 2024

In fact, just about everything sexual that happens in the film is dirty, unpleasant, unsatisfying, and led to pain and heartbreak for just about everyone involved (25th anniversary)

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 30, 2022

The Ice Storm contains a deeply human authenticity and willingness to portray, but not resolve, its characters' collective alienation.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 14, 2022

Family life -- the real focus of The Ice Storm -- is rendered as having something like the alienating density of prison; each solitary feels enclosed in his or her own sentence and injustice.

| Aug 12, 2020

The film's smartly told through the eyes of the children...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 7, 2020

The key to The Ice Storm's ambiguity and unexpected depth is that the events of the story mean wholly different things to different characters -- there's no moral, just life sliced like a loaf of bread.

| Oct 25, 2019

Elegantly directed by Sense and Sensibility's Ang Lee, it frames the moral vacuity of the Seventies with cool, contemporary hindsight.

| Oct 11, 2019

Nothing less than one of the year's best pictures, a portrait of wealthy Connecticut suburbanites in the 1970s whose lives have no emotional or spiritual rudder.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 28, 2019

The Ice Storm captures this place, this season, this garish and confused moment in history, with surgical precision...It's Lee's sympathetic detachment that gives the movie its paradoxical power.

| Feb 27, 2018

Among its many virtues, 'The Ice Storm' keenly captures the sheer, visceral terror of puberty-of grappling with these urges, trying to do what you think you're supposed to, and lashing out when you can't.

| Oct 7, 2017

I think one of the things [Ang Lee] really specializes in is ensemble pieces like this one.

| Feb 27, 2014

What struck me about it was the fluidity and discipline of Lee's direction, the performances which captured so beautifully the confusion of that period of cultural and sexual evolution, and the compassion which I think is a feature of all of Lee's films.

| Feb 27, 2014

Drug use and sexual content in Ang Lee masterpiece.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 12, 2013

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 7, 2011

Beautifully nuanced, passionately performed, and terrifically realized piece of work.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 15, 2009

Beautifully acted, refreshingly un-camp in its take on wide lapels and progressive rock and occasionally coolly moving. It's just that ultimately, there's less here than meets the eye.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 21, 2008

Arguably Lee's first truly essential film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 21, 2008

A well-observed and deftly performed examination of upper-middle-class emotional deep freeze...

Full Review | Jul 28, 2008

As in any joke, destiny is a major character.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 24, 2008

A rich and elegant drama.

| Original Score: A | Sep 24, 2007