70
The cast has been well chosen, but Kerr gets only occasional opportunities to reveal her talents.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
Films on this subject are generally solemn and naive, but director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger bring wit and intelligence to it.
100
Slant Magazine by Joseph Jon Lanthier
Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye.
100
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.
90
The New Yorker by Michael Sragow
This is a landmark of Hollywood-on-Thames trompe-l’oeil.
100
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
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
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.