Critic Reviews
69
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
8(57%)
mixed
6(43%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 14 Critic Reviews
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Metascore
Metascore
100
The most innovative, intelligent, and visually sumptuous horror film of recent years.
90
Like all the best fairy-tales, the film is purely sensual, irrational, fuelled by an immense joy in story-telling, and totally lucid. It's also a true original, with the most beautiful visual effects to emerge from Britain in years.
83
A lush, ambitious, strikingly outsized play on Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood that makes explicit the dangers of a budding young woman straying from the path.
80
It's also absolutely jam- packed with the kind of symbols that delight Freudian analysts of culture, particularly of folk tales.
80
By the time this distinctive 1986 film is over we have been treated to a lavish fugue on the themes of childhood, wolves, eroticism and myth. [11 Jun 1989, p.2]
75
It is not a children's film and it is not an exploitation film; it is a disturbing and stylish attempt to collect some of the nightmares that lie beneath the surface of Little Red Riding Hood.
75
One of the least classifiable, most fascinating horror films of the past decade. [07 Dec 1990, p.28]
75
The Company of Wolves is a trifle long, but the sequences of bona fide scariness and beauty compensate for the occasional longueurs, and it's great to be a kid again, as the artists behind the film know; they also know it can scare the hell out of you. Always cry wolf. [20 Apr 1985]
60
Admirably attempting an adult approach to traditional fairy tale material, The Company of Wolves nevertheless represents an uneasy marriage between old-fashioned storytelling and contemporary screen explicitness.
60
It is a complex and at times infuriating structure — it often helps to conceive of the film as the book of short stories it stems from — but simultaneously vivid and disturbing.
