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90One of the best films of this year...unlike anything you've seen on the big screen.
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80A landmark -- the first movie to give a convincing, feature-length account of sex from a woman's point of view.
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80A dark and unsparing study of female masochism and a brittle sex comedy of manners, Romance is unsettled in tone, to say the least.
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75I did not really enjoy this movie, and yet I recommend it. Why? Because I think it's on to something interesting. Here is a movie about a woman who never stops thinking. That may not be as good for you as it is for her.
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75No other mainstream movie has so openly tackled the subject of female sexual experience.
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75Despite many flaws...Romance is unquestionably an important film.
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70There's never been a movie director like Catherine Breillat, a fearless visionary and one hell of a woman.
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67The movie is a footnote as well, a minor reference back to the days when people yearned for a cinema that was serious and erotic at the same time.
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63A singularly cheerless trip, explicit but sterile, racy but dull.
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60For those who believe that movies are a proper place to explore the riddle of sex, no holds barred, this movie is de rigueur.
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60The eroticism is powerful, and the documentary candor and directness of the sex scenes make this well worth seeing.
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53Showing the sex seems to be the film's raison d'etre, which gets you only so far.
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50More cautionary than titillating...some of it (is) deliberately disturbing.
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50It's like watching a bad update of an Antonioni film.
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50An au natural (read: graphic) tryst-a-thon whose fashion sense is outweighed only by its bulky sexual intellectualism.
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50Lots of sex, but little joy.
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50A cheerless exercise.
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Hovers between passion and philosophical argument without fully achieving its ambition to fuse the two.
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40Visually stunning and breathtakingly frank, but thrill-seekers beware.
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30Sex may, indeed, be all in the mind, but Romance fails to score in the mind's eye.
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30The fact that Romance was written and directed by a woman doesn't make the film any better; it simply makes it objectionable on other grounds.
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25Catherine Breillat's pretentious, meandering, self-indulgent portrait of a libidinously deprived young woman is nothing more than pornography tricked out as feminist parable.
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20Exists in some kind of limbo, between hard-core porn and European art film, and it's not likely to satisfy fans of either.
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20As pretentious as it is hard-core specific, this fiercely anti-erotic film makes even the chilly "Eyes Wide Shut" play like "The Big Easy."
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20It's mostly an ordeal--for actress and audience.
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0The film so strongly fixates on strange, explicit sexual acts that it forgoes any emotional (i.e. romantic) aspects of sex.