A Dangerous Method: Critic Reviews

"A Dangerous Method" is full of ideas about sexuality - some quite provocative, even a century after their first articulation - but it also recognizes and communicates the erotic power of ideas.

Cronenberg has created a drama of male hysterics with no interest in diagnosing their own condition - perhaps the career of each is a continuous, elaborate symptom.

A Dangerous Mind feels heavy and lugubrious. It is a tale that comes marinated in port and choked on pipe-smoke.

As a biographical film, Method gives real insight to its subjects, especially Jung.

Perhaps Cronenberg's most transgressive movie yet, one in which ideas - rather than their fetishistic signifiers - possess more energy and verve than the most calculated shock effect.

"A Dangerous Method'' begins where other films hope to culminate.

As cataclysmic as it is, this historically scrupulous science-fiction romance concerning the discovery of the unconscious mind might have been titled War of the Worlds or The Beast From 5,000 Fathoms.

The only truly dangerous element here belongs to Keira Knightley, who dares to offer the most off-putting performance of the year.

Mr. Fassbender is entirely persuasive, not to mention extremely attractive, and Mr. Mortensen is intriguingly nuanced.

A Dangerous Method is well cast with Michael Fassbender as a pent-up Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud. Keira Knightley​ inhabits the fits and fury of Spielrein.

The harder you look at it, the wilder, and more disturbing, and more moving, it becomes.

Using a dialogue-heavy approach that's unusual for Cronenberg, his film is skilled at the way it weaves theory with the inner lives of its characters.

A satisfying drama of historical speculation, substantially researched and shrewdly dramatized...

This is a movie with too much talk and not enough sensation.

This is a freaky thing to behold: Knightley's wildly physical rendering of a mentally unbalanced soul.

Pivots as much on political gamesmanship and intellectual dominance as sadomasochistic urges and infidelity.

The true story is extraordinary; the film is not, although the actors are all fine.

Whatever the elements, Cronenberg has made a good movie from them, with outstanding performances by Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen.

As Freud, who believes the basis of all insanity is sexual repression, and Jung, who is monogamous and resistant to such extremist views, the miscast male stars are bland as dust and look like a box of Smith Brothers cough drops.

David Cronenberg's career-long fascination with matters of the mind manifests itself in compelling but determinedly non-mind-bending fashion.

"A Dangerous Method'' presents a vivid portrait of pre-World War I Europe that's at a considerable remove from the types of madness usually seen in Cronenberg's films.

Cronenberg has reached the stage of his career where he doesn't feel it necessary to pander to expectations. Instead he seeks to engage us, and he succeeds.

Cronenberg's 'A Dangerous Method': Vertiginous Intellectuality

A Dangerous Method is a suave chamber piece: a series of glimpses of two 20th-century intellectual titans, in friendship and separation, and the story of a remarkable woman who history had swallowed up, brought into the light again.

It's a handsome and stimulating film, noteworthy more for its terrific acting and provocative ideas than for any kind of dark Cronenbergundian genius.