Lady Chatterley: Critic Reviews

[A] startling, womanly adaptation of a lesser-known, more direct version of D.H. Lawrence's famous novel, one of three he wrote.

Pascale Ferran's version of Lady Chatterley feels bracingly fresh, vital and modern.

This isn't so much Beauty and the Beast as Beauty and the Dull Bloke.

[The director] cannily turns [the characters'] corporeal discoveries into a moral mission, two desperately lonely souls crying for spiritual freedom in a world of moral constriction.

Sensual in escalating degrees of heat, but the film's eroticism, which is substantial, is laid on with a caress.

Nearly three hours long, Lady Chatterley passes as swiftly as the summer shower. This is not so much a love story (and even less a story about love) than it is a movie of passionate loveliness.

It captures the animal attraction we call lust and carefully tracks its evolution to true love. For all its faults, this beautifully shot, sexually graphic film is a gem.

I found the first half-hour a snooze, but once I adjusted to the movie's rhythms, I was completely enraptured.

All of the qualities its admirers see in the film are indeed there, and visible, but I was not much moved. Lawrence wrote much better novels that inspired much better movies...

Ferran's sureness in charting every step in the couple's discovery of each other never falters; when they eventually find the opportunity to remove their clothes before having sex, it's a major achievement, and celebrated as such.

A long, but never lazy, celebration of the natural world, of sexual desire and discovery, and of the peculiar social order of early-20th-century Britain, Lady Chatterley is also a heartbreaking story of true love.

Paradoxically for a film about unchecked sexuality, it never comes alive. Unless you come to it already fascinated by the story, there's not much in this dull, dutiful dramatization to win you over.

Lady Chatterley leads us into the thickets of D.H. Lawrence's fiercely tender saga of a sexual communion between a man and a woman of different classes, but similarly affected in their enforced solitudes by the wonders and glories of nature.

Intelligent and tasteful, even while being sexually frank.

Director Pascale Ferran is true to the spirit of the book and gives us an eyeful, of both the glorious countryside and the lovers' physiques.

The relationship ...becomes more intriguing somewhere in the movie's third hour, but getting to that point is too much of a chore.

A picture about passion that invites none, a picture far easier to admire than to adore.

It's a profoundly thought-out picture about a love affair that blooms organically and spontaneously.

It's a movie as timely as it is thrilling to watch.

It's a special pleasure to report that the French Lady Chatterley is the most frankly sensual movie in memory.