Critics reviews

The film places Kinski against the lush backdrop of the French countryside, as photographed by Ghislain Cloquet and Geoffrey Unsworth. Cloquet, who'd worked with Bresson on Au Hasard Balthazar, took over when Unsworth, who'd been Director of Photography on Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey, suffered a fatal heart attack during the third week of shooting. This collaboration resulted in a strikingly beautiful movie, particularly the exteriors that recall the realist paintings of Gustav Courbet.

Made at a time when half the world, it seemed, considered its director a pariah—as many have continued to vilify as champion Polanski in the thirty-five years since the Gailey incident—Tess stands as one of the filmmaker's gentlest, most sumptuous works.

...Consider various landscapes where Tess appears: in the fields with her baby; walking through the mud to see Angel's family; surrounded by the police at the film's end. Each scene reveals that her complex characterisation is as moody and intense as the scenery that surrounds her. This characterisation is reinforced by the cinematography. The cinematography works, then, to intensify our understanding of the film and highlights Polanski's meticulous filmmaking.

This lushly photographed Franco-British production (1979) comes on like an overbudgeted episode of Masterpiece Theatre, but seen in the context of Roman Polanski's career it becomes something rich and strange, shaded into terror by the naturalistic absurdism that is the basis of Polanski's style... The film is remarkably faithful to the Thomas Hardy novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, upon which it is based, yet it has been totally transformed in spirit.