76% of critics love the film.
Kidman knows how to find all the sweaty splendor in overheated material, but she has quiet fun with this one.
The character dynamics transfix … but I was most taken with the way Coppola uses style to create meaning.
Although the picture is noticeably lacking in taut suspense of the conventional variety, it flies in close to a subtler, hotter flame: The sensuality of deceit.
Coppola enriches the story top to bottom, but she doesn’t exploit the full opportunity to radically reconceive it; the ending seems to arrive too abruptly, when the film’s hotbed of conflict is still simmering.
Coppola’s film is told with surgical precision and savage grace.
I spent a chunk of the film wondering what here excited Coppola – what was it about the novel that she couldn’t wait to bring to the screen?
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