Slant Magazine

Tess is thus an almost unprecedented example of sweeping historical epic that also functions as an intense personal meditation on the capricious vicissitudes of love and death.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

This is a wonderful film; the kind of exploration of doomed young sexuality that, like Elvira Madigan, makes us agree that the lovers should never grow old.

Slant Magazine by Budd Wilkins

Tess is thus an almost unprecedented example of sweeping historical epic that also functions as an intense personal meditation on the capricious vicissitudes of love and death.

The New York Times by Janet Maslin

A lovely, lyrical, unexpectedly delicate movie. [12 Dec 1980, p.C8]

Newsweek by David Ansen

It takes nearly three hours for Tess to reach its tragic climax at Stonehenge, but the deliberateness and occasional longueurs pay off: Tess is depthcharged, resonant. [22 Dec 1980, p.73]

The Associated Press by Bob Thomas

Tess is as rewarding a film as you'll encounter all season. It has a veracity to its period that matches Tom Jones and a pictorial beauty that is breathtaking. [29 Dec 1980]

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Jay Scott

The detached tone of Tess - contemplative and fatalistic, resigned and melancholy - may be non-romantic and in the end not entirely true to Hardy, but it is full of love and compassion for those who seek both in a world where there is so little of either. [14 Feb 1981]

The A.V. Club by Ben Kenigsberg

Not as radically stylized as Polanki’s violent Macbeth, Tess is literature rendered in consummately classical terms.

The Guardian

An outstanding piece of work.

The Dissolve by Keith Phipps

The film, like its source, is filled with pessimistic fatalism, but it spares no pity for the instruments of fate, painting Alec as an irredeemable villain. What, if anything, this meant to Polanski remains unknowable.

The Guardian by Philip French

An outstanding piece of work.

Variety by Staff (Not Credited)

Tess is a sensitive, intelligent screen treatment of a literary masterwork. Roman Polanski has practiced no betrayal in filming Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and his adaptation often has that infrequent quality of combining fidelity and beauty.

TV Guide Magazine

Visually, Tess is a masterpiece, capturing in amazing detail the scenery and atmosphere of the England of yore. The film's chief drawback, however, is its lack of vitality. Instead of Hardy's passionate tale of ruin and disenchantment, Tess is cautious and reserved.

Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr

Seen in the context of Roman Polanski's career it becomes something rich and strange, shaded into terror by the naturalistic absurdism that is the basis of Polanski's style.

Empire

Insufferably long, but very good in parts.

The New Yorker by Pauline Kael

Roman Polanski’s version, from 1980, of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is textured and smooth and even, with lateral compositions subtly flowing into each other; the sequences are beautifully structured, and the craftsmanship is hypnotic. But the picture is tame.

Time Out

Having all the strengths and excesses of a middlebrow film (visual beauty, lush soundtrack, arty direction), this adaptation's appeal to the senses leaves them cloyed.