... Too calculated, precious, and artificial to be captivating. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/10 | Oct 4, 2022

While Beauty is prettily composed and the acting was just fine, the overall effect left me feeling pretty empty.

| Mar 4, 2019

Sleeping Beauty aspires to create a... haunted disconnect between Lucy's presentation and her subjectivity. Yet Leigh isn't able to muster a cinematic equivalent of a first-person narration that would convey Lucy's interiority to the viewer.

| Jul 9, 2018

[Director Julia] Leigh shows great confidence as a visual stylist and director of actors.

| Mar 3, 2018

Understatedly strange, erotic, quietly surrealistic and slightly disturbing, it's a striking film that immediately marks out its Australian writer-director as a confident new cinematic voice.

| Jan 3, 2018

At no point did any of the symbolism in Sleeping Beauty feel organic.

| Oct 23, 2017

It's difficult to fault the film's artistry and its originality.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 29, 2014

[The] movie trades in ambiguity and uncomfortable awkwardness, the often hypnotising trance it emits is a fascinating sight to witness.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 17, 2013

Even if the film's final chapter seems far too on point, if not glib, the filmmaker continues to mine complicated psychological terrain with a clear-eyed stringency.

| Jul 1, 2013

It's so sterile and clinical and emotionless that making a film about the emotionlessness of sex has become more of a cliche than just good ole Cinemax softcore porn.

| Original Score: D+ | Jun 23, 2013

She spends much of the movie baring her fascinatingly underdeveloped body; her vagina is her temple. There's no graphic sex, but its intimations are anything but sexy.

| Jun 20, 2013

Wallows in the mud as a sicko exploitation pic.

| Original Score: C+ | May 30, 2013

Juggling moments of pitch black humour and disturbingly tense scenes of abuse, Sleeping Beauty has a queasy, mismatched tone that underscores an uneven, elliptical movie.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 28, 2012

Comically pretentious and unreasonably slow...

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jul 21, 2012

The film's stifled sexual politics seem both non-feminist and critical of a 21st-century pornographic world, where all of us are stuck in our cubicles of detached, narcissistic desire.

| Feb 9, 2012

It is also, sadly, frustratingly, disappointingly and, most importantly, relentlessly boring.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 27, 2012

[An] arty exploitation pic passed off as a feminist parable...

| Original Score: C | Jan 12, 2012

I could see it inspiring interesting discussions afterward, but there is the matter of having to sit through it first.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 12, 2012

This is a strange film that gets into issues of the meaning of sex, of male fantasy, even of feminism.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jan 1, 2012

Though it seems appropriate to make "Sleeping Beauty" as empty, enervating and dull as its main character, it only serves to underscore the lack of entertainment or insight.

| Original Score: C+ | Dec 22, 2011