The End of the Affair: Critic Reviews

Tasteful and seductive.

The best and most graceful Greene adaptation since The Third Man.

This is the kind of movie in which even the sex scenes are soulless.

For all its obvious psychoanalytic implications, [Jordan's] wacky romantic triangle lost me long before it crawled to its spiritualist conclusion.

Jordan proves again that he is a supreme storyteller of complex human dramas.

The characters are so unsympathetic, the adulterous love affair at the heart of the story so joyless, and the three main performances so mannered that it's hard to feel anything but disappointment and boredom.

The elegance of Roger Pratt's camera and the handsome costuming create a tension between the stately surface world and the raw passion of the characters.

For two-thirds of The End of the Affair [Jordan] does an astonishing job of fusing his pop-magical temperament with Greene's astringency and wit.

Handsomely mounted, literate, emotionally sophisticated, The End of the Affair has everything a period romance should have.

The whole thing is beyond purple and yet so careful and reverent you can't even enjoy it as camp.

What a sad and melancholy piece of work. ... Fiennes basically reprises his English Patient role as the heroic destroyer of covenants and promises.

Writer/director Neil Jordan takes the right approach to the material. Instead of trying to spruce it up, he simply moves in closer.

Neil Jordan's film captures an unyielding sense, even almost to a fault, of romantic realism and its often underlying sadness.

a demanding, thought-provoking film ...built around a theme many will find difficult to accept, that miracles can happen to perfectly ordinary, non-religious people.

Can anyone fail to recognize this as a fundamental betrayal of the author’s creative vision?

Depicts the way a lapsed Catholic is surprised by grace and a defiant unbeliever is convinced to believe in God.