In the Cut

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

If In the Cut falls short of the masterpiece Campion intended, it's unquestionably the most ambitious and important film to come along in months.

Film Threat Clint Morris

Like “Basic Instinct”, it’s a sexually charged thriller centering around a cop and a sex-mad and slightly perplexing woman.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

Ryan's performance burns with a rare and passionate veracity. The other half of the delight comes from director Jane Campion, whose sensualist eye and scabrous heart infuse In the Cut with guts and glory.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

The movie has a nasty, creepy edge that never lets up, and the characters are deliberately grating and alienating. This is a thriller that, like some classic noirs, glories in its own mean aura, its casual profanity and grotesque violence.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Actually, the film may be too grubby and sordid and ghoulish for its own box-office good. It's certainly going to send more than a few of the New Zealand director's sensitive women fans running from the auditorium.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Grim and sordid though it often is, the film has a steady flow of visually absorbing images. It's an art movie for the masses.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

Jane Campion's astonishingly beautiful new film may be the most maddening and imperfect great movie of the year.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The best (which also means the sexiest) Campion feature since "The Piano," featuring Meg Ryan's best performance to date and an impressive one by Mark Ruffalo.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Meg Ryan does such an effective job of evoking her sexually hungry lonely girl that it might have been better to just follow that line and not distract her and the audience with the distraction of a crime plot.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

As a thriller, In the Cut, with its red herring characters and plot twists, turns dopey and predictable. As a portrait of a single woman, burned by love and wary of what's in store, Campion's movie has its trenchant, telling passages.

Empire Emma Cochrane

Romantic images are subverted, the sex scenes are graphic and desperate. It's less grim than Susanna Moore's original novella, but the foreshadowing that all is not right is in everything, from the music to the dialogue.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Ryan is raw and remarkably good, but the film's real star is New York. Draped in post-9/11 anxiety and brimming with a free-floating fear, the city hasn't appeared this threatening since the '70s.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

A disjointed, sometimes fascinating mélange of moods, associations and effects.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

An intermittently gorgeous and evocative film that's so taken with its trangressively bloody and erotic content, it neglects such fussy niceties as coherent plotting and the creation of characters of middling intelligence, plausible psychology or sympathetic nature.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

More ambitious, but also much harder to swallow than the average Hollywood hack effort, In the Cut is a muddle of thriller and art-house phantasmagoria.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Ultimately never slices things as sharply as it attempts, but it’s definitely a cut above.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

At once belabored and muddled movie, whose dreamy visual style and daring sexual material can't elide glaring inconsistencies in tone, plot and logic.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Aggressively grim and gory.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A disappointing erotic thriller from director Jane Campion that amounts to an implausible update on "Looking for Mr. Goodbar."

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

Emerges as a frustrating cop-out.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

If your reason for seeing In the Cut is to watch America's sweetheart stripped bare, you'll get what you're looking for. On the other hand, if you're looking for a good movie, this one will disappoint.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Beautifully crafted and highlighted by an arresting change-of-pace perf by Meg Ryan as an English teacher erotically awakened by a homicide detective. But the story's unpalatable narrative holes and dramatic missteps will hold sway over the pic's better qualities.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray

Though the oppressive artiness makes the early scenes fairly ridiculous, the director's odd methods add rare tension to the climax, as it becomes evident that the finale won't be so predictable in Campion's hands.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The result, sadly, is a mess.

USA Today Mike Clark

An OK mood piece but story-hungry murder mystery that flubs its whodunit fundamentals.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

A remarkably dislikable film, long on atmosphere -- I admired Dion Beebe's brooding cinematography -- and desperately short on vitality.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Isn't just a movie about decapitation; it's a decapitated movie. It has no idea where its head is at.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Campion is dabbling in several different types of movie here: police procedural, film noir, romantic melodrama, sex fantasia. None really succeeds.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

Campion and company may like to think they've made something provocative, moody and new but it's really just "Looking For Mr. Goodbar" with extra nuts.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

It might even work if In the Cut was remotely convincing as a thriller, but Campion can't help wrinkling her nose at genre.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

The movie is all moist grime and seedy atmosphere, and it's certainly something to look at: It's beautifully lurid. But it's an empty, unengaging movie, and by the end, it has become ridiculous, too.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Campion has made something that's almost unbearably pretentious.

The New Yorker David Denby

In the Cut is completely controlled and all of a piece, and yet, apart from one performance (Mark Ruffalo), it's terrible--a thriller devoid of incidental pleasures or humor, or even commonplace reality. [27 October 2003, p. 112]

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

As a movie, it must stand or fall by intense chemistry between the lead characters. Sadly, as co-written by Campion and Moore, In the Cut suffers from a fatal emotional and erotic imbalance.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Although Ryan is cannily cast against type, she doesn't bring much more than muttery incoherence and nudity to the role.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Campion has no clue how to sustain suspense and no actress of the caliber of Holly Hunter, Nicole Kidman or Kate Winslet (her recent leading ladies) in the main role.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

In the Cut is a disaster. Familiar to the bone, arty on the surface, it could serve as the doomed pilot for a nightmare TV spinoff: Law & Order: Literary Victims Unit.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Ryan radiates neither desire nor terror. She's freeze-dried in a world of lifelessly abstract feminine fear, and so is the movie.