The Beguiled
Columbia Pictures | Release Date: June 23, 2017 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
77
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 45 Critic Reviews
Positive:
38
Mixed:
7
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Total FilmJane CrowtherJul 10, 2017
Witty, menacing and steamy (in every sense), The Beguiled is an intelligent update and Coppola’s best work to date. Oscars await. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternJun 22, 2017
The strength of her film transcends the soldier’s power to seduce. We’re beguiled, as an audience, by seeing this male animal as he is seen, and for better and worse experienced, by a diverse and dynamic group of females. And by seeing, in the end, how The Beguiled gives new and memorable meaning to the notion of a finishing school. Read full review
91
ConsequenceAllison ShoemakerJun 23, 2017
There’s grace to be found in The Beguiled, and delicacy, but what’s most interesting is the brutality and power that seethe beneath the surface. Read full review
91
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 24, 2017
The Beguiled is a lurid, sweltering, and sensationally fun potboiler that doesn’t find Coppola leaving her comfort zone so much as redecorating it with a fresh layer of soft-core scuzz. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangJun 22, 2017
The fascination and at times the frustration of her achievement is that she has drained away some of the story’s juiciest, most suspenseful elements.... There is compromise in all this narrative subtraction, but there is also purpose. Read full review
90
Village VoiceBilge EbiriJun 21, 2017
Coppola’s a master at taking something that could be portentous and rendering it delicate, thereby reclaiming its depth. Read full review
90
VoxAlissa WilkinsonMay 24, 2017
As a film, The Beguiled is thrilling, delicious, wicked fun. Read full review
90
TimeStephanie ZacharekMay 24, 2017
Though it borrows some of the gauzy mood of The Virgin Suicides, it’s essentially unlike any other Sofia Coppola film, a serene, supple picture that hits more than a few notes of despair. Read full review
90
Screen DailyTim GriersonMay 24, 2017
The film consistently works as both a straightforward psychosexual thriller and something more troubling — almost unspoken — underneath. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Julia CooperJun 29, 2017
The Beguiled is Coppola’s bloodiest, most visceral movie to date, and it is also one of her best. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJun 29, 2017
The 1971 version of The Beguiled was blunt and overheated and a little bit nuts. The 2017 edition is more sophisticated and nuanced — but it’s still a little bit nuts. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyJun 23, 2017
Gorgeously shot by Philippe Le Sourd (in his first collaboration with Coppola), The Beguiled lingers on its images, allows us time to settle into them. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversJun 20, 2017
Coppola is a virtuoso of image and sound. but don't mistake her delicate touch for weakness. The Beguiled is a hothouse flower of startling power and intimacy. You can't shake it. Read full review
84
Paste MagazineAndrew CrumpJun 30, 2017
The discussion of what the film isn’t is a discussion worth having, just not at the expense of what the film is: Delicious, sensual, made with sterling craft and an unassumingly sharp edge. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattJun 23, 2017
For all that lavish calibration, its beauty is a little remote, too — so beguiled by style that it forgets, or simply declines, to make us feel too much. Read full review
83
The Film StageRory O'ConnorMay 24, 2017
Coppola and her production team — including The Grandmaster cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd — have created a fully realized world of eroticism, humidity, and Southern Gothic atmosphere. The characters are simply engulfed by it, almost to the point that even the twisted willow trees appear to be reaching out to grab them. Read full review
80
EmpireDamon WiseJul 10, 2017
Coppola’s most traditional film to date is a heightened, darkly comic, sexually tense drama that flips the male gaze, to show what happens when a man, for once, gets caught in the crosshairs of desire. Read full review
80
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottJun 29, 2017
Certainly one of the more engaging and alluring films released so far in 2017. Read full review
80
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJun 22, 2017
[Ms. Coppola’s] Beguiled is less a hothouse flower than a bonsai garden, a work of cool, exquisite artifice that evokes wildness on a small, controlled scale. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsStephen Whitty Jun 21, 2017
Still, there is plenty of erotic tension here, as the days drift by and the nights drag on. Kirsten Dunst is terrific as a slightly sad teacher with her own designs on the Yank. And Elle Fanning is a landmine in lace as the school flirt. Read full review
80
We Got This CoveredMatt DonatoJun 21, 2017
The Beguiled is a deliciously dangerous period thriller that refuses to let a man's privilege go unchecked like the Hollywood standard. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinMay 24, 2017
Coppola’s The Beguiled doesn’t have the southern-gothic kick of its predecessor. It’s not a horror movie. Its power is in its undercurrents, in the sense that what we’re seeing isn’t inevitable but a sort of worst-case scenario of genders in opposition. No one is wholly good or bad. Both sides are beguiled. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinMay 24, 2017
It’s every inch a group achievement, and the film’s best scenes are its ensemble ones: prayers before bedtime, musical recitals, meals by candlelight. Read full review
80
Time OutDave CalhounMay 24, 2017
The Beguiled has its jolts and its laughs, but mostly this glides along like a mildly saucy yet poetically made parable, well-dressed, well-designed and well-performed. Read full review
80
CineVueJohn BleasdaleMay 24, 2017
It has a powdery dryness, a sly wit which is indeed beguiling. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 24, 2017
Coppola tells the story with terrific gusto and insouciant wit, tying together images from the first scene and the last, so that the narrative satisfyingly snaps shut. Read full review
79
IGNAlex WelchJun 26, 2017
It may not be Coppola’s most thought-provoking or emotional outing to date, but it’s a chilling and stunningly well-made one nonetheless. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayJun 29, 2017
On its own terms, The Beguiled is a finely crafted, gemlike exercise in surface tension and subterranean stirrings. Seen through the prism of history and culture, it’s difficult not to feel that some essential truth has been lost in translation. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJun 29, 2017
The Beguiled probably could've benefited from a little more energy in its telling. Still, Coppola offers some gorgeous images of the past made present. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrJun 28, 2017
For all its smarts, however,the film feels the slightest bit impersonal and risk-free. Coppola has been faulted in various quarters for dropping a female slave from her remake. Read full review
75
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldJun 28, 2017
Candles illuminate faces in the dark; a curving staircase looms like a shadow. And the actors pitch their roles perfectly: Kidman’s breathy calm; Farrell’s charm, just hinting at something dark within it; Fanning’s way of prettily arranging herself, showing off Alice’s newfound power; Dunst’s quiet melancholy. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Jun 23, 2017
What this Beguiled has done is deepen the material’s implicit wellsprings of loneliness and longing, mitigating some of the inherent sexism by attempting to genuinely grapple with the desires of its cooped-up characters. It’s “tasteful” hothouse pulp, if such a thing is possible. Read full review
75
The PlaylistJessica KiangMay 24, 2017
The Beguiled only ever lets its freak flag fly at half mast, and until the end where some very enjoyable archness is allowed to creep in, this Southern Gothic tale of female sexual jealousy feels surprisingly dated. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzJun 29, 2017
The Beguiled is an atmospheric remake that Sofia Coppola never quite manages to take from languid to lurid. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovJun 28, 2017
The Beguiled is a slow-burn tale of repressed sexuality and duplicitous doings. Its final twist, though, steals it from the realm of male-gaze fantasies into sheer nightmare territory. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliJun 29, 2017
It’s a near-miss that offers a captivating atmosphere and strong performances to go along with an uneven tone and a climax that’s so overcooked that it bursts at the seams with unintentional humor. Read full review
63
Philadelphia Daily NewsGary ThompsonJun 29, 2017
Dunst is playing it straight here, but there is enough arch in Kidman’s eyebrow to signal that Coppola is having fun around the edges of this Southern gothic, with its formal compositions and deliberate pacing (as usual, a little too deliberate for my taste). Read full review
63
Slant MagazineSteve MacfarlaneJun 22, 2017
The Beguiled serves as proof that what goes for naturalism in Sofia Coppola’s dominion still verges on being decorative to the point of self-parody. Read full review
60
SlateDana StevensJun 21, 2017
From an aesthetic and technical perspective, her achievement is laudable, but there’s something underfurnished about this movie, a lack of historical, intellectual, and thematic richness. For all its elaborate design and carefully calibrated mood, it comes down to the tale of a randy fox in an impeccably preserved Greek Revival henhouse. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyMay 24, 2017
It’s hard to detect a strong raison d’etre behind Sofia Coppola’s slow-to-develop melodrama. Read full review
60
VarietyOwen GleibermanMay 24, 2017
Coppola, in attempting to elevate the material, doesn’t seem to realize that The Beguiled is, and always was, a pulp psychodrama. Now it’s pulp with the juice squeezed out of it. Read full review
58
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerJun 23, 2017
A few of the performances, especially Nicole Kidman’s, as the lady in charge, and Kirsten Dunst’s, as the teacher pining to flee with the corporal, have some bite, but not enough to make much of an imprint in this brittle, vaporous chamber piece. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreJun 27, 2017
Coppola stripped the tale, cut the length, eschews menace and goes easy on the malice, which made the earlier version of the story work. Even as an arch, serio-comic female revenge fantasy, this Beguiled fails to cast the necessary spell. Read full review
50
USA TodayBrian TruittJun 22, 2017
Writer/director Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled showcases good manners and bad deeds, though it lacks the necessary edge to make it a satisfying revenge thriller. Read full review
50
The New YorkerAnthony LaneJun 19, 2017
There is barely a graceless frame in the whole affair. Read full review
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