Valmont

TV Guide Magazine by

Milo Forman's Valmont is the weakest version so far, suffering from willfully wrongheaded casting, a comic-strip "free" adaptation by former Luis Bunuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere, and Forman's heavy-handed direction of material that requires the most sophisticated glancing touch.

Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt

Livelier, more absorbing, and generally better acted than "Dangerous Liaisons," which arrived a year ago. But it runs out of inspiration long before it runs out of plot twists, and we've seen the twists too many times before.

The New York Times by Janet Maslin

For every necessary touch that Valmont has reduced or dispensed with (the climactic duel scene, for instance), there is another, less vital moment that has been expanded.

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

The results are too pretty and well acted to be a total washout, but the fascination with evil and power that gives the novel intensity is virtually absent; what remains is mainly petty malice and mild cynicism.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Liam Lacey

Forman's treatment is another matter entirely - infinitely more subtle and, using the intrinsic bias of film, far more naturalistic. [18 Nov 1989]

Rolling Stone by Peter Travers

The film is rapturously beautiful, enticing us into a lush, aristocratic world.

Time by Richard Schickel

Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

The Frears version is cerebral and claustrophobic, an exercise in sexual mindplay.