What I find such a pity is that Russell should apparently so distrust his own skill as a mesmerising story-teller.

| Mar 18, 2020

What is quite certain is that Russell has been true to himself as never before and that in doing so, he will irritate, excite, bore and outrage more film-goers than ever before.

| Mar 18, 2020

Even more than The Music Lovers, The Devils reveals an infantile compulsion to shock and repel, cost what it will.

| Mar 18, 2020

The truly provocative -- some might even say blasphemous -- part of the film is its assertion that, even while preaching their rhetoric of sin and salvation, nuns and priests and cardinals are only human, and humans are nothing but animals.

| Nov 8, 2018

It is like a lunatic opera, an attempt to make a furious poem out of frenzy. Russell's flamboyant theatricality and his interest in the perverse have been too much imposed on his other films; but here, style and subject are perfectly matched.

| Nov 8, 2018

All the events and persons depicted in The Devils are intended to be confused with actual events and persons. How do I know? Ken Russell tells me so.

| Original Score: 0/4 | Apr 29, 2018

Whatever the moral perspective, it keeps you gripped right to the end.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 9, 2015

Reed carries the film with an admirably restrained portrayal of the doomed priest. Redgrave, on screen only sporadically, is stunning as the salacious sister.

| Aug 14, 2008

No matter how thickly Russell piles on the masturbating nuns, tortured priests and dissolute dauphins, there's no getting round the fact that it's all more redolent of a camp revue than a cathartic vision.

| Jan 26, 2006

It's a see-through movie composed of a lot of clanking, silly, melodramatic effects that, like rib-tickling, exhaust you without providing particular pleasure, to say nothing of enlightenment.

| May 9, 2005

It's like a David Lean remake of Pink Flamingos.

| Jan 1, 2000