Black Narcissus

Black Narcissus has an erotic charge that's to this day been so often lacking in British cinema. Read full review

Films on this subject are generally solemn and naive, but director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger bring wit and intelligence to it. Read full review

Sexual tension hangs in the air as the wind blows and native drums beat, but it's on a visual level that the film excels. Read full review

Disorientingly glorious and thrilling, it’s a beguiling mixture of believability and artifice, of the sort that only the movies can manage. Read full review

A major cult film, but a bit much, to put it mildly. [23 Sep 1991, p.F12]

One of my problems with Black Narcissus is that I never found the characters credible. I didn’t believe any of them and their interpersonal conflicts contrived and artificial. Read full review

Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye. Read full review

It remains a rapturous, near-indescribable work of cinematic art, spun from a simple story about nuns who travel to the Himalayas to start a school and a hospital, only to have mountain winds and native mysticism weaken their confidence and their faith. Read full review

The co-directors created from Rumer Godden's novel an extraordinary melodrama of repressed love and Forsterian Englishness - or rather Irishness - coming unglued in the vertiginous landscape of South Asia. Read full review

Powell and Press-burger may have a picture that will disturb and antagonize some, they also have in Black Narcissus an artistic accomplishment of no small proportions. Read full review

This is a landmark of Hollywood-on-Thames trompe-l’oeil. Read full review

Kathleen Byron is unforgettable as a sister who goes dangerously off the rails. A beautifully designed movie with Oscar-winning colour photography by Jack Cardiff. [27 Apr 2014, p.48]

Fifty Shades of Grey can only dream of being as erotic a work as Powell and Pressburger's tale of repressed desire and simmering passions among a community of nuns at a convent in the Himalayas. Jack Cardiff's cinematography, with its rich, dark interiors and mountains painted on glass, is among the most beautiful in film. [09 Mar 2020]

For Powell and Pressburger, the personal and the political—much like their distinctive mix of high and low artistry—weren’t separate bedfellows: Even a marvelously entertaining tale of repressed abbesses on the edge could explore, with enduring resonance and profundity, an empire losing its grip. Read full review

An odd, unsettling film which suggests the dangers of both emotional restraint and unchecked passion, Black Narcissus is also one of the most visually beautiful films ever made in color. Read full review

The cast has been well chosen, but Kerr gets only occasional opportunities to reveal her talents. Read full review