Critic Reviews

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]

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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]

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]