This is cinematography at its best -- film used to present a view, in motion, of a reality that has been artistically ordered to reveal a greater-that-literal essence.

| Jun 17, 2022

Watching this long, placid maddeningly subdued movie, you can't help wondering what became of Hardy's stark chronicle of crimes of passion.

| Jun 17, 2022

It does not shout and it does not speed; it rolls along effortlessly, at an even rate, like a country brook, and when it ends one wishes for more.

| Jun 17, 2022

One emerges from [Roman Polanski's] endless version of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles with a sense that one could have read the book in a shorter span and had more fun too.

| Jun 17, 2022

The triumph of Tess is in the yoking of remorseless Hardian sadism to the natural photogenic allure of both Kinski and her surroundings (not to mention Anthony Powell’s gorgeous costumes).

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 17, 2022

The film has all the air of an expensive, classy commercial product, the result more of market research than intimate inspiration... [Roman Polanski's] experiences seem to have left [him] without much compassion, and Tess without compassion is nothing.

| Jun 17, 2022

It's not art at all. It's art-like. Tess feeds on a sort of romanticized self-pity. If indeed Polanski sees himself mirrored in Tess's story, it's not as the resilient, sensual, quietly outraged character that Hardy imagined, but as a victim.

| Jun 17, 2022

Tess is a beautiful film -- three hours (including an intermission) of perfectly lit, mood-evoking shots on locations that make us feel as if we've traveled through time as well as space on this tour of the English countryside.

| Jun 17, 2022

Tess is Roman Polanski's Barry Lyndon. Much like Stanley Kubrick's film of five years ago, Tess is a spacious, atmospheric and brilliantly photographed period piece based on a novel about a hapless pawn of a highly regimented British caste system.

| Jun 17, 2022

This fidelity to the original [novel], combined with the director's efforts to approximate in visual terms the author's prose, gives the film a quality of authenticity and power that lifts it far above the ordinary.

| Jun 17, 2022

This film is one of those rare treasures that restores one's faith in the efficacy of the cinema.

| Jun 17, 2022

Tess is sinfully delicious melodrama, but there's a somber undercurrent of snobbery, pettiness and the rigid Victorian notion that peasants were property, not people.

| Jun 17, 2022

It is a beautifully visualized period piece that surrounds Tess with the attitudes of her time -- attitudes that explain how restricted her behavior must be, and how society views her genuine human emotions as inappropriate. This is a wonderful film.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 17, 2022

Polanski's Tess is the rarest of contemporary movies, an old-fashioned kind of romantic drama that commercial Hollywood hasn't made in years.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 17, 2022

Mr. Polanski's version seems rather stolid, though he sticks firmly to Hardy's moving tale of a lass whose love life carries her to a tragic fate. Yet it's sensitively directed, in its own conservative way, and luminously photographed.

| Jun 17, 2022

How strange that a Polish director working on locations in France should make one of the most faithful and satisfying film versions of a classic English novel in my memory.

| Jun 17, 2022

Though its approximate three-hour run (intermission included) may seem to pass more slowly than an evening with the book itself, it is a soothing spectacle.

| Jun 17, 2022

A beautifully wrought, handsomely produced, flawlessly directed and acted film. It's as faithful to its source as any film version of a novel I've ever seen, and in addition, is possessed of an exquisite, incandescent performance by Nastassja Kinski.

| Jun 17, 2022

Polanski has in Tess an accomplishment that is dazzlingly atypical and altogether unexpected, not only for the picture's theme and subject matter but for Polanski's cinematic approach. He's never told a story with his camera quite this way before.

| Jun 17, 2022

Polanski's realization of mood and milieu is remarkable, and much of this obviously is due to the superb photography of the Hardy Country locations.

| Jun 17, 2022