In the Cut

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. more

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

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. more

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. more

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. more

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. more

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

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. more

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. more

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. more

"In The Cut" is an adaptation of Susanna Moore's excellent novel of the same title, published in 1995. Director Jane Campion has departed significantly from the novel in several places, especially with the ending, but has managed to capture much of the book's eroticism, dark edginess, and palpable suspense. Frannie Avery, superbly acted by Meg Ryan, is an attractive 35 year-old divorcee who lives in a two room apartment on Washington Square. She teaches creative writing at NYU to a group of inner-city teens. She is also a connoisseur and scholar of language and is writing a book on street... more

To be honest, I kind of thought the movie was going to be bad (I didn't like the book), but I went to see it anyway, since I learned that Jane Campion was the director. Having seen and loved her "Angel at my Table," "The Piano," and "Holy Smoke," I was interested in finding out why exactly this independent New Zealand director left Australia and went, so to speak, "Hollywood." Well, it turns out that Campion was only doing a favor for Nicole Kidman, who was going to play the lead role (Nic decided against it later on, and became one of the executive producers instead). The film itself is... more

I must confess, that Susanna Moore's novella is probably one of the most memorable books that I've ever read. I loved its raw sexual intensity, its dark, dangerous sexual underworld, and the fact that it never compromised and shied away from the smut-ridden side of life. This movie version, directed by Jane Campion, and starring Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo is, from the outset, a pretty accurate account of the book. But I'm in two minds about this movie - there is no doubt that it's an honest portrayal of graphic sleaze, but the movie ultimately suffers from a kind of arty pretentiousness,... more