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100It is a surprisingly entertaining film - funny, wicked, sharp-tongued and devious. It does not solve the case, nor intend to. I am afraid it only intends to entertain.
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100What makes it such a mesmerizing, wickedly witty entertainment is the revealing portrait it paints of an era in which everyone is presumed guilty where greed is concerned... It's an often chilly movie, but the chill cuts to the bone.
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100Barbet Schroeder directed the ingeniously made film, which weaves fact, hypothesis, and conjecture into a harrowing yet continually gripping and often highly amusing narrative. [12 Oct 1990]
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100The juxtaposition of liberal Jewish attorney Dershowitz (Silver) and von Bulow working together on the latter's defense makes for some engagingly offbeat drama, with some interesting insights into the legal process.
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88If Silver is superb, Irons is transcendent. As some forgotten comic once said of George Sanders: A grapefruit wouldn't dare squirt in his eye. [17 Oct 1990]
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100A marvelously sad and funny docucomedy. [22 Oct 1990]
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100This engrossing mystery-comedy peeks through the keyholes of the rich and infamous in a manner both droll and delicious.
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90Irons, busily offset by Silver, gleefully choreographed by Schroeder, gives the picture its real bravura reason for being. [19 Nov 1990]
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100The comic contrast between the genteel snobbery of von Bulow, a Danish aristocrat, and Dershowitz's dry contempt for his well-tailored client is treated with understated but stinging wit in Nicholas Kazan's brilliant script. [9 Nov 1990]
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100What makes it so instructively entertaining is the pivotal character of Claus von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons within an inch of his professional life. It's a fine, devastating performance, affected, mannerly, edgy, though seemingly ever in complete control. [17 Oct 1990]
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88Mesmerizing.
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88Irons' Von Bulow is easily the most attractive and entertaining movie heavy since James Mason's villain in ''North by Northwest,'' a figure with whom he shares a taste for elegant homes and wry understatement. [17 Oct 1990]
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100The performances of Close and Silver are flawless, but it is Irons' portrait that remains behind, an enigmatic after-image… Reversal of Fortune is a delectable tour through facets of the lives of the rich and famous that Robin Leach wouldn't touch with a forked stick. [17 Oct 1990]
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Funny and scary, Reversal is a tour de force for Schroeder, who examines the idle rich, the intricacies of the legal system, and the imperatives of morality concisely but with unmatched brio.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 10
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Mixed: 2 out of 10
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Negative: 0 out of 10
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BrendanH.9
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HanselH.7No. 9 on the all time metacritic list? No way. Not a bad movie. But highly overrated.