Stealing Beauty Critic Reviews

What's more, Bertolucci's voice is stronger, clearer and more effortlessly confident than it has been in years. He's stolen the beauty of Tuscany and his youthful star and transformed it into an exquisite work of movie art.Read the full review

Filmmakers of Bernardo Bertolucci's magnitude don't often take on sexual coming-of-age movies, but judging from the pleasures of Stealing Beauty, maybe more of them should. [14 Jun 1996 Pg.04.D]Read the full review

A model of poise and restraint, the film flows in a way that is deliberately undramatic, but made no less involving by the dreamy gentleness of its approach.Read the full review

Can Tyler act? Impossible to say. Bertolucci's neatest trick is to have constructed the movie around Tyler's gawky unself-consciousness.Read the full review

In contrasting the sexuality and rebellion of Lucy's generation with his own, Bertolucci clearly yearns to rekindle his creative spirit.Read the full review

This film maker's supremely tactile, sensual style and his taste for exoticism are captivatingly on display in Stealing Beauty, even if the film's philosophizing sometimes lacks the intellectual heft of a cotton puff.Read the full review

This film is aesthetically pleasing but not emotionally satisfying. It's occasionally erotic but rarely dynamic.Read the full review

The script (written by Susan Minot from a story by Bertolucci) suffers from the same tired blood as his characters, and his direction is often ponderously self-conscious.Read the full review

The movie plays like the kind of line a rich older guy would lay on a teenage model,suppressing his own intelligence and irony in order to spread out before her the wonderful world he would like to give her as a gift.Read the full review