Critical Reception
Upon its release, the film was internationally praised for its direction, script, and performances, possessing a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 100% rating among the "Cream of the Crop" critics. A.O. Scott included the film in his New York Times essay "The most important films of the past decade — and why they mattered."
"… a genuine modern tragedy. It's also the best movie of the last several years: the most evocative, the most mysterious, the most inconsolably devastating… I could barely breathe; I swore at the screen; I called for blood; I cried for vigilantism to restore the natural order; and I sat in shock when the natural order was and wasn't restored. That's the thing about a masterpiece like In the Bedroom. It isn't over when you leave the theatre. It isn't over when you brood on it for days. It's just always going to be there, in the air…"
David Edelstein, Slate Magazine
"It is apparent that Field has not only studied the masters of cinematic understatement, such as Ozu and Bergman, but that he fully understands their processes. Consequently, this is a film that lives beyond its two hours. Field's achievement is such a perfectly consummated marriage of intent and execution that he need never make another movie. I would not be alone, I think, in hoping he will make many more."
Neil Norman, The Evening Standard
"Like Kubrick, Field's direction manages to feel both highly controlled and effortlessly spontaneous at the same time; and his lifting of the facade of this picturesque, Norman Rockwell setting is carried out with surgical precision… also like Kubrick, Field doesn't make any moral judgments about his characters, and his film remains stubbornly enigmatic. It can be read as a high-class revenge thriller, an ode to the futility of vengeance or almost anything in between.."
William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Read more about this topic: In The Bedroom
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