43
Metascore
19 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 63Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertM. Butterfly does not take hold the way the stage play did.
- 60The New York TimesJanet MaslinThe New York TimesJanet MaslinM. Butterfly as idiosyncratic as Mr. Cronenberg's work always is, is sometimes too flat and ambiguous for its own good.
- 50Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovAustin ChronicleMarc SavlovDespite the sheer gorgeousness, it ends up feeling false and, towards the end, rushed.
- 50ReelViewsJames BerardinelliReelViewsJames BerardinelliThe movie, however, seems to make the wrong decision at almost every opportunity, trying for the kind of melodramatic tragedy that only works in opera.
- 50TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazineThough carefully cast and set in the most exotic of locales, the drama lacks any real excitement, the director's glacial style aligning itself all too patly with Hwang's arid rhetoric.
- 42Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanEntertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanCronenberg directs this doomed romance in the same flat, claustrophobic, night-of-the-zombies style he employed in ''Naked Lunch''; as a dramatist, he's still stuck in Interzone.
- 40EmpireKim NewmanEmpireKim NewmanThe end result, while not entirely unrewarding, is another step away from the singular vision Cronenberg once expressed even in his marginal works.
- 40TimeRichard CorlissTimeRichard CorlissM. Butterfly, the David Cronenberg film of David Henry Hwang's Broadway play, fumbles its romantic and political metaphors and loses the game.
- 30Chicago ReaderLisa AlspectorChicago ReaderLisa AlspectorThe fundamental problems with David Cronenberg's disastrous 1993 adaptation, written by Hwang himself, are twofold: the unsuitability of such a premise for film, where the actors and audience no longer share the same space, and the miscasting of Jeremy Irons as the accountant and John Lone as the diva.
- 30VarietyTodd McCarthyVarietyTodd McCarthyThis butterfly just doesn't fly. Icy, surprisingly conventional and never truly convincing.