Would I like the movie better if Bertolucci had put in the novel’s cheap thrills? You bet I would.

| Sep 12, 2023

| Original Score: B | Sep 7, 2011

A disappointingly reductive adaptation of Paul Bowles's first novel.

| Dec 7, 2007

Those who haven't read the book will be left bewildered.

| Dec 7, 2007

As you'd expect, it's a big, handsome film, rich and strange in psychological depths and eroticism. Malkovich and Winger play woundingly well.

| Jun 24, 2006

A long, beautifully modulated cry of despair.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 20, 2003

Bowles's gentle, avian features, the obvious wisdom of his years and his distinctive presence are practically worth the price of admission.

| Jan 1, 2000

The book is so complete, so deep and so self-contained that it shuts the movie out. Bertolucci shows us the outsides and the surfaces, and a person seeing this movie without having read the book might ask what it is about.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

[A] frustrating, monotonously obscure movie.

| Jan 1, 2000

| Original Score: B | Jan 1, 1990