100
TV Guide Magazine
The most innovative, intelligent, and visually sumptuous horror film of recent years.
The Company of Wolves
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- United Kingdom
- 1984
- · 95m
Director
Neil Jordan
Cast
Angela Lansbury,
David Warner,
Graham Crowden,
Brian Glover,
Kathryn Pogson,
Stephen Rea
Genre
Fantasy,
Horror
Wolves and werewolves lurk throughout the dreams of young Rosaleen, who imagines that she must journey through a dark forest to live with her grandmother. When Rosaleen meets a rugged hunter in the woods, she discovers that she has an animal-like attraction to him, leading to a macabre turn of events.
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What are critics saying?
100
TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)
The most innovative, intelligent, and visually sumptuous horror film of recent years.
90
Time Out
Like all the best fairy-tales, the film is purely sensual, irrational, fuelled by an immense joy in story-telling, and totally lucid. It's also a true original, with the most beautiful visual effects to emerge from Britain in years.
90
Time Out by Staff (Not Credited)
Like all the best fairy-tales, the film is purely sensual, irrational, fuelled by an immense joy in story-telling, and totally lucid. It's also a true original, with the most beautiful visual effects to emerge from Britain in years.
83
The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias
A lush, ambitious, strikingly outsized play on Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood that makes explicit the dangers of a budding young woman straying from the path.
80
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
By the time this distinctive 1986 film is over we have been treated to a lavish fugue on the themes of childhood, wolves, eroticism and myth. [11 Jun 1989, p.2]
80
The New York Times by Vincent Canby
It's also absolutely jam- packed with the kind of symbols that delight Freudian analysts of culture, particularly of folk tales.
75
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
It is not a children's film and it is not an exploitation film; it is a disturbing and stylish attempt to collect some of the nightmares that lie beneath the surface of Little Red Riding Hood.
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Jay Scott
The Company of Wolves is a trifle long, but the sequences of bona fide scariness and beauty compensate for the occasional longueurs, and it's great to be a kid again, as the artists behind the film know; they also know it can scare the hell out of you. Always cry wolf. [20 Apr 1985]
75
The Seattle Times by John Hartl
One of the least classifiable, most fascinating horror films of the past decade. [07 Dec 1990, p.28]
60
Variety
Admirably attempting an adult approach to traditional fairy tale material, The Company of Wolves nevertheless represents an uneasy marriage between old-fashioned storytelling and contemporary screen explicitness.
60
Empire by Ian Nathan
It is a complex and at times infuriating structure — it often helps to conceive of the film as the book of short stories it stems from — but simultaneously vivid and disturbing.
60
The Irish Times
Rich in imagination and ambition, and highly original as it explores the darker, sexual side of familiar fairytales, chiefly Little Red Riding Hood. [04 Nov 2005, p.9]
60
Variety by Staff (Not Credited)
Admirably attempting an adult approach to traditional fairy tale material, The Company of Wolves nevertheless represents an uneasy marriage between old-fashioned storytelling and contemporary screen explicitness.
50
Chicago Tribune by Gene Siskel
It seems that director Neil Jordan is trying to make some comment on the way classic fairy tales try to force adult attitudes on young, free spirits, but the method by which we are brought to that realization is tortuous. [22 Apr 1985, p.4C]
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