- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100What we sense after the film is that the natural sources of pleasure have been replaced with higher-octane substitutes, which have burnt out the ability to feel joy.
-
100This emotional climax of the film, with its warring glints of despair and hope, typifies the stunning achievement of The Ice Storm and confirms Lee as a director of the first rank.
-
100Provocative, entertaining, and impeccably crafted.
-
100This remarkable analysis of a decade when American society lost its moral compass is both brutally honest and lyrically compassionate.
-
90A harsh (though slightly toned down from Moody's book), deeply moving, emotionally rich and intelligent film about the difficulty of rebelling against social restrictions--and the inescapable consequences of such attempts when they do succeed--The Ice Storm should not be missed.
-
90Elegant and deeply disquieting drama.
-
83Kevin Kline is sweetly befuddled as a good man caught between worlds, and Sigourney Weaver, as a hard, sexy adulteress, makes her wit sting.
-
80The dazzling ensemble perfectly captures every nuance in one of the finest acting showcases you could hope for.
-
80Unlike many dramas of middle-class family wreckage, which tilt toward soapoperatic revelations, The Ice Storm is told from an ironic, almost meditative distance that gives the movie its paradoxical power.
-
80A well-observed and deftly performed examination of upper-middle-class emotional deep freeze, The Ice Storm is an intelligent, adult American film.
-
75Never becomes the thoroughly satisfying psychological drama that it promises to be. There's also a problem with the central metaphor of ice -- a literary device that turns repetitive and obvious.
-
75This time, he (Ang Lee) has Kevin Kline, Joan Allen and Sigourney Weaver trudging through ice both emotional and literal -- an omnipresent metaphor but not one unduly sledgehammered. [26 September 1997, pg. 1 D}
-
70Ricci's Wendy captures the volatile combination of aggressiveness and uncertainty in a young woman trying to come to terms with her sexuality like no performance since Emily Lloyd's in "Wish You Were Here." It's a very different performance, quieter, harder and yet more vulnerable.
-
70It's during the shift to seriousness that The Ice Storm makes its missteps. The intrusion of tragedy, while altogether believable, still seems like a device, a calculated tug at the heart strings. It is, in short, a once-effective ploy that now feels like a cliche. A near-miss might have been more effective.
-
70Lee views these mortal fools with a sorrowful detachment. He's a sort of clinical humanist, editorializing only by what he leaves out. The downside of this method is its impersonality, which limits our involvement. The upside is its lack of cheap sentiment, and its clarity.
-
70The decade has been fondly spoofed in capers like "The Brady Bunch," but Lee's film takes a much more searing, if initially hilarious look at the sexual revolution's migration to a New England suburb and the community's subsequent meltdown. [17 October 1997, p.D6]
-
63Leaves the audience on such a devastatingly dramatic ledge.
-
60An honorable film, beautifully acted, refreshingly un-camp in its take on wide lapels and progressive rock and occasionally coolly moving. It's just that ultimately, there's less here than meets the eye.
-
60As frigid as its name. Burdened with a story of some of the world's least interesting people going through a holiday crisis, director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus get as close as any creative team could to making matters involving, but the task is finally too much for them.
-
60The tragic and highly "symbolic" death toward the end, which is supposed to illustrate the sins of the parents being visited upon their children, barely resonates at all, because most of the insights are strictly incidental. The film elicits guilty, lascivious chuckles, not analysis.
-
50Directed by Ang Lee, whose exposure of middle-class hypocrisy would be more effective if it weren't rigged to provide evidence for the story's take on contemporary values.
-
50With The Ice Storm, Lee seems to have emphasized the details of cultural accuracy over the rudiments of telling a gripping drama.
-
30Unfortunately, the drama operates on a see-through, easily shatterable metaphor: the frigidity of the WASP soul. [17 October 1997, p.N32]
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 5 out of 6
-
Mixed: 0 out of 6
-
Negative: 1 out of 6
-
BryanH.10
-
BobD.0
-
LeonardoF10Absolutely brilliant.