Critics reviews

The misjudgement seems glaring only because the movie has observed at all other times the rule of 'show, not tell' - and sometimes there isn't even any showing... The picture concentrates instead on the moments of intimacy or isolation that these characters experience in their compartmentalised lives.

Sachs doesn't make "scenes." He sets up his characters and follows them carefully, the way Antonioni does; the editing is smooth and almost invisible. There's nothing self-conscious or derivative about Sachs' style. Forty Shades is not a movie about other movies, like so many of the most ambitious films of the past ten years. Sachs has something to say and as an artist he is using film to say it; he remains dedicated to a humanist investigation of overlooked people.

The bits of background business that would pose difficulties for many filmmakers—random phone conversations and work interactions, the extroverted demonstrations of affection among the musicians, the amiably alcoholic tone of Memphian social gatherings—are inventive and spontaneous. One wonders how Sachs blends scripting and improvisation to arrive at this pleasing fiction-documentary amalgam.

Sachs, who wrote the script with Michael Rohatyn, creates a fresh and unpredictable portrait of the mother. But the narrative doesn't keep building on what it starts out with and stalls toward the end.

There are so many things about Forty Shades of Blue that don't quite work that it's easy to forget how much really does, and that's a shame. Between this film and The Delta, Sachs has done enough to demonstrate his own prodigious talents behind the camera and the strength of his vision, even if the material he's working with here doesn't always play to his strengths.

it's Korzun's film, and she is in complete control of her character... Astounded by her affluent lifestyle, and hyperaware of how easily she could lose it, Laura tiptoes on eggshells in virtually every scene, even as she breaks down into tears after sex and explains it away with an instant and believable lie about her son's school and her own social discomfiture. It's a stunning scene, crafted moment to moment like a glasswork.

A triumph of insightful humanism, these interludes serve another purpose: in their heady swirl of feeling and vitality they become the literal living bars on the central character's gilded cage, tantalizing her with hopeful possibilities that she is consistently unable to attain.

Probably the best film in the Dramatic Competition (and indeed won the Jury Award) – yet something of the magic of Sachs's first feature The Delta (1996) is missing.