100
BBC
Black Narcissus has an erotic charge that's to this day been so often lacking in British cinema.
Black Narcissus
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- United Kingdom
- 1947
- · 100m
Directors
Emeric Pressburger,
Michael Powell
Cast
Deborah Kerr,
David Farrar,
Flora Robson,
Kathleen Byron,
SABU,
Jean Simmons
Genre
Drama
A group of nuns is sent to open a convent high in the Himalayas. The locals are friendly and welcome them enthusiastically, as does the local ruler, The General. But, when the General dies and his twenty-something-year-old son takes over, things get even more complicated.
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What are critics saying?
100
TV Guide Magazine
An odd, unsettling film which suggests the dangers of both emotional restraint and unchecked passion, Black Narcissus is also one of the most visually beautiful films ever made in color.
100
Slant Magazine by Joseph Jon Lanthier
Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye.
100
Empire by William Thomas
Sexual tension hangs in the air as the wind blows and native drums beat, but it's on a visual level that the film excels.
100
Time Out by Keith Uhlich
For Powell and Pressburger, the personal and the political—much like their distinctive mix of high and low artistry—weren’t separate bedfellows: Even a marvelously entertaining tale of repressed abbesses on the edge could explore, with enduring resonance and profundity, an empire losing its grip.
100
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The co-directors created from Rumer Godden's novel an extraordinary melodrama of repressed love and Forsterian Englishness - or rather Irishness - coming unglued in the vertiginous landscape of South Asia.
100
The A.V. Club by Noel Murray
It remains a rapturous, near-indescribable work of cinematic art, spun from a simple story about nuns who travel to the Himalayas to start a school and a hospital, only to have mountain winds and native mysticism weaken their confidence and their faith.
100
LarsenOnFilm by Josh Larsen
Disorientingly glorious and thrilling, it’s a beguiling mixture of believability and artifice, of the sort that only the movies can manage.
100
BBC by Tom Dawson
Black Narcissus has an erotic charge that's to this day been so often lacking in British cinema.
100
TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)
An odd, unsettling film which suggests the dangers of both emotional restraint and unchecked passion, Black Narcissus is also one of the most visually beautiful films ever made in color.
90
The New Yorker by Michael Sragow
This is a landmark of Hollywood-on-Thames trompe-l’oeil.
90
The Observer (UK) by Philip French
Kathleen Byron is unforgettable as a sister who goes dangerously off the rails. A beautifully designed movie with Oscar-winning colour photography by Jack Cardiff. [27 Apr 2014, p.48]
75
Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr
Films on this subject are generally solemn and naive, but director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger bring wit and intelligence to it.
70
Variety
The cast has been well chosen, but Kerr gets only occasional opportunities to reveal her talents.
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