M. Butterfly

Geffen Pictures | Release Date: October 1, 1993

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

43	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 19 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Marc Savlov

Despite the sheer gorgeousness, it ends up feeling false and, towards the end, rushed. Read full review

Lisa Alspector

The 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. Read full review

Roger Ebert

M. Butterfly does not take hold the way the stage play did. Read full review

EmpireKim Newman

The end result, while not entirely unrewarding, is another step away from the singular vision Cronenberg once expressed even in his marginal works. Read full review

Owen Gleiberman

Cronenberg 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. Read full review

James Berardinelli

The movie, however, seems to make the wrong decision at almost every opportunity, trying for the kind of melodramatic tragedy that only works in opera. Read full review

Janet Maslin

M. Butterfly as idiosyncratic as Mr. Cronenberg's work always is, is sometimes too flat and ambiguous for its own good. Read full review

Richard Corliss

M. Butterfly, the David Cronenberg film of David Henry Hwang's Broadway play, fumbles its romantic and political metaphors and loses the game. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

Though 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. Read full review

Todd McCarthy

This butterfly just doesn't fly. Icy, surprisingly conventional and never truly convincing. Read full review

Jay Carr

Cronenberg's direction is technically impressive, but he's better suited to stories based on surges of feeling between killers, not lovers. This M. Butterfly never takes wing. [08 Oct 1993]

Michael Wilmington

M. Butterfly, David Cronenberg's visually stunning but oddly cold and sparkless adaptation of the much-prized David Henry Hwang play. [08 Oct 1993]

Kenneth Turan

After sitting through M. Butterfly, you'll wonder why they even bothered to try. [01 Oct 1993]

Kristi Turnquist

Director David Cronenberg has made a movie about a man who apparently needs to get his eyes checked. [08 Oct 1993]

Mick LaSalle

The film is a methodical and loving examination of two people constructing a fantasy for themselves. [08 Oct 1993]

William Arnold

Unlike "Crying Game" (which, despite the gender confusion, definitely works as a love story for a general audience), the only emotion this movie evokes for its star-crossed lovers is an unpleasant sense of incredulity. [08 Oct 1993]

100

Geoff Pevere

The exceptional story of a low-level diplomat who had a 20-year affair with a man he thought was a woman, is, in Cronenberg's hands, turned into a beguiling masterpiece on the question of self-deception. [01 Oct 1993]

Mike Clark

One hesitates to call David Cronenberg's movie of David Henry Hwang's Tony-winning play conventional or tame, but certainly it is zestless given a filmmaker whose last three outings have been "The Fly," "Dead Ringers" and "Naked Lunch." [01 Oct 1993]

Hal Hinson

David Cronenberg's film version of David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning play, is no more successful in solving it than any other versions of this fantastic tale have been.... "The Crying Game" it's not. [09 Oct 1993]