Recencies van critici

While the modern story proved a tougher nut to crack, the film's Victorian half stands up very well. If its twin themes of romantic obsession and social hypocrisy scarcely make for especially novel observations, they're staged and performed with admirable conviction – indeed, the cutaways to the American actress 'playing' the troubled Sarah Woodruff serve to emphasise the technical achievement of Streep's performance (the first that highlighted her uncanny ear for foreign accents).

[The book is] a tour de force but posed a uniquely difficult task for the filmmaker. Pinter's screenplay is a masterful achievement in that it not only offers a sense of alternative and layered storytelling but also provides a unified focus for the thrust of the film's experience, which is different from the novel's more detached and scholarly appeal.

[It's] an exceedingly clever idea. Trouble is, Pinter never really figures out what to do with it, beyond its broad conception. For one thing, the two parts of the diptych are unbalanced: Until the last few minutes, Anna and Mike's scenes are both infrequent and brief, making up only perhaps 15 percent of the film's total running time. Nor does Pinter, despite being one of the 20th century's greatest playwrights, succeed in making the contemporary characters more than cardboard ciphers.

By explicitly recalling Godard's claims that "a tracking shot is a moral issue," the opening of The French Lieutenant's Woman announces its interest in New Wave questions of cinematic authenticity. In a sense, it ups the ante of François Truffaut's Day for Night by deleting much of the material that would make this a more digestible film "about" filmmaking.

Tasteful, dull, and nearly dead, with all the actors turned into buglike caricatures under the gaze of Karel Reisz's distorting, entrapping wide-angle lens. The film has been praised for its ingenious solution to the dual-ending problem posed by John Fowles's novel, yet the cleverness of the solution so dominates the structure that the inherent meanings of the material are reduced for it.