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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (24) | Top Critics (9) | Fresh (12) | Rotten (12) | DVD (1)
A disappointingly reductive adaptation of Paul Bowles's first novel.
Those who haven't read the book will be left bewildered.
As you'd expect, it's a big, handsome film, rich and strange in psychological depths and eroticism. Malkovich and Winger play woundingly well.
A long, beautifully modulated cry of despair.
[A] frustrating, monotonously obscure movie.
The book is so complete, so deep and so self-contained that it shuts the movie out. Bertolucci shows us the outsides and the surfaces, and a person seeing this movie without having read the book might ask what it is about.
Filled with stunning visuals.
Disappointing.
Brimming with obscure meaning and devoid of drive and fervor, the film dries up in that symbolic desert sun, the victim of its own pretensions and a casualty of trying to film something best suited to the realm of cult literature.
Bertolucci's grand desert epic gets stuck in the sand right at the start.
(No quote available.)
Soul searching is rarely a thrill a minute but it's rarely as tedious as this. ...Oscar-bait it may be, but "The Sheltering Sky" is more deserving of the First Annual Chicken Little Award.
I would feel like I was overlooking some considerable flaws if I called this movie perfect, but I am perfectly okay with saying that I loved it. Bertolucci's direction is as powerful as ever, controlling tone and atmosphere with the precision we expect from him. This is among his most visually beautiful work, with Vittorio Storaro's cinematography providing aesthetic poetry in almost every scene. Peculiarly constructed and sometimes confusing, I found this film's debatable narrative faults to be conducive to its overall effect. John Malkovich and Debra Winger are outstanding, and there are plenty of strong supporting performances as well. A beautiful, unnerving epic drama.
Super Reviewer
A painfully long movie...
The worst!!! When its finally over you find yourself asking, how can so many talented people make something this pretentious and odious.
Bertolucci's worst film. I would rather tear my eyes out than see this again.
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