Critic Reviews

• Marta Barber, Miami Herald

  While Cacoyannis' film may not be totally faithful to the master's pen, for literature students and theater lovers, this Cherry Orchard is a rare treat.

• Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News

  Ms. Rampling, still beautiful well into her 50s, has an earth-bound weariness and lively spirit that convey a life fully and tragically lived.

• Jonathan Perry, Boston Globe

  Cacoyannis is perhaps too effective in creating an atmosphere of dust-caked stagnation and labored gentility.

• Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle

  Drags along in a dazed and enervated, drenched-in-the- past numbness.

• Misha Berson, Seattle Times

  Scrupulously acted (in English), visually perfected and skillfully complemented with Tchaikovsky piano music.

• Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

  Looking aristocratic, luminous yet careworn in Jane Hamilton's exemplary costumes, Rampling gives a performance that could not be improved upon.

• Prairie Miller, WBAI Web Radio

  The film spars with a light touch and heavy heart among character, social friction and class contradictions.

• Steven Leigh Morris, L.A. Weekly

  In capturing the understated comedic agony of an ever-ruminating, genteel yet decadent aristocracy that can no longer pay its bills, the film could just as well be addressing the turn of the 20th century into the 21st.

• David Jays, Sight and Sound

  One of the film's most effective aspects is its Tchaikovsky soundtrack of neurasthenic regret.

• Jean Lowerison, San Diego Metropolitan

  Chekhov has never looked or sounded better.

• Chris Hewitt (St. Paul), St. Paul Pioneer Press

  The new film of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard puts the 'ick' in 'classic.'

• David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune

  A sometimes tedious film.

• Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central

  Cacoyannis' vision is far less mature, interpreting the play as a call for pity and sympathy for anachronistic phantasms haunting the imagined glory of their own pasts.

• William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  It's not a bit stagy, yet it manages to be dazzling theater.

Read all 14 critic reviews