50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by
With its exotic setting and its beautiful cast, this Dangerous Liaisons is lovely rather than wicked.
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40
Revenge may be a dish best served cold, as the novel suggested, but steamy adaptations simply can't be doled out lukewarm.
70
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
Schadenfreude carries a delectable tang no matter the language, and as the history of Hollywood shows, stories about pretty people behaving badly remain reliably alluring.
65
Relocating Dangerous Liaisons, the 18th-century French erotic intrigue, to 1930s Shanghai is a bold move. And yet it's not especially surprising. In Chinese movies, that city in that decade frequently serves as shorthand for decadence.
50
Village Voice by Nick Pinkerton
The least one should hope for from another adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons is savory, salacious trash, but nothing in Hur Jin-ho's tony new version approaches the dizzying depths of Sarah Michelle Gellar spelling out the conditions of her sex bet with Ryan Phillippe ("You can put it anywhere . . .") in 1999's "Cruel Intentions."
80
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
Visual sumptuousness trumps the coldly erotic dastardliness of previous incarnations, but where this version feasts is on close-ups, with exchanges between pairs of eyes - the predatory versus the hesitant, the manipulatively comforting opposite the blindly vulnerable - that recall the silent era.
58
Hur invests the period setting with an eye-popping opulence that's meant to highlight the elite decadence that came before the fall, but his Dangerous Liaisons isn't particularly sophisticated on a political or historical level.