M. Butterfly Critic Reviews

David Cronenberg's film version of David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning play, is no more successful in solving it than any other versions of this fantastic tale have been.... "The Crying Game" it's not. [09 Oct 1993]Read the full review

The movie, however, seems to make the wrong decision at almost every opportunity, trying for the kind of melodramatic tragedy that only works in opera.Read the full review

M. Butterfly as idiosyncratic as Mr. Cronenberg's work always is, is sometimes too flat and ambiguous for its own good.Read the full review

Cronenberg's direction is technically impressive, but he's better suited to stories based on surges of feeling between killers, not lovers. This M. Butterfly never takes wing. [08 Oct 1993]Read the full review

After sitting through M. Butterfly, you'll wonder why they even bothered to try. [01 Oct 1993]Read the full review

The film is a methodical and loving examination of two people constructing a fantasy for themselves. [08 Oct 1993]Read the full review

One hesitates to call David Cronenberg's movie of David Henry Hwang's Tony-winning play conventional or tame, but certainly it is zestless given a filmmaker whose last three outings have been "The Fly," "Dead Ringers" and "Naked Lunch." [01 Oct 1993]Read the full review

Cronenberg directs this doomed romance in the same flat, claustrophobic, night-of-the-zombies style he employed in ''Naked Lunch''; as a dramatist, he's still stuck in Interzone.Read the full review

M. Butterfly does not take hold the way the stage play did.Read the full review