Hideous Kinky Reviews
TV Guide's Movie Guide
The film's gradual slide into a darker vision of the casual selfishness and presumption that often lay at the heart of Westerners' mind-bending journeys to the East is subtle and quietly devastating.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Top CriticThe fusion of dream sequences and evocative landscapes makes the characters' feverish sense of living at the edge of reality contagious.
Kate Winslet, luscious in a brilliantly colored caftan and flushed from the heat of an African sun, makes a beautiful hippie, circa 1972, in Hideous Kinky.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
TheMovieReport.com
A picturesque travelogue of some substance.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Kate Winslet continues an uninterrupted line of fine performances with the modest yet affecting Hideous Kinky.
Sacramento News & Review
Gillies MacKinnon spins Esther Freud's autobiographical novel into an intriguing, somewhat muddled tale of escapism and revelation.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
MacKinnon draws terrific performances from all involved (Winslet bravely refusing to court our sympathies), lets character, mood and meaning take precedence over story, and assembles a great music track as a bonus. Spot on.
Nitrate Online
Winslet is terrific as a mother whose quest for spiritual enlightenment comes at the expense of her family.
| Original Score: 4/5
It augurs well for the long-term integrity of her career that Winslet in this movie doesn't try to ingratiate herself with the audience.
Film Threat
Whilst one somewhat empathises with the woman who tells Winslet's character that she's selfish and crazy for bringing up two English girls in a wild, African country, one also can't help but envy the children's experiences.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Boston Phoenix
This is a film about the luxury of being non-judgmental, of spiritual generosity before it's shrunken by diminished expectations. Hideous Kinky recovers that fragile state of mind and vindicates its innocence.
Sight and Sound
Gillies MacKinnon is one of those stimulating film-makers who hates to repeat himself.
Spirituality and Practice
A cross-cultural gem that is spiked with superb performances, colorful characters, and one of the great closing sequences in recent memory.
