61
Metascore
16 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 90VarietyDerek ElleyVarietyDerek ElleyFrom its opening shots, Butterfly Kiss exudes a confidence and distinctive feel that promises something rather special. Unlike its characters, the pic knows where it's going.
- 88Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertThe performances have a gravity about them that is unusual in the movies. How you respond to Butterfly Kiss depends on what you bring to it, and how much empathy you are willing to extend to these sad and horrifying women.
- 88San Francisco ChronicleEdward GuthmannSan Francisco ChronicleEdward GuthmannPlummer gives her strangest, most uninhibited screen performance to date. Playing Eunice, a wildly psychotic killer with a working-class British accent and a mysterious past, Plummer draws a streak of white-hot rage across the screen.
- 83The A.V. ClubKeith PhippsThe A.V. ClubKeith PhippsThe final effect is less haunting than was probably intended, but Butterfly Kiss is worth a look.
- 80Los Angeles TimesKevin ThomasLos Angeles TimesKevin ThomasThe filmmakers set themselves to the daunting task of involving us in two people they couldn't remotely ask us to like or care about. But Plummer and Reeves create two profoundly damaged and dangerous people with such wit, insight and comprehension that if you're so disposed you can actually see in them your own frustrations, anger and capacity for denial and easy rationalization.
- 80SalonSalonAs Eunice, Plummer gets a rare chance to stretch, and she doesn't disappoint. Her performance is a cocktail of despair, charm, self-hatred, bitterness, religious ecstasy, coquetry and homicidal rage. She's genuinely frightening after the fashion of early Robert De Niro, with all the hair-trigger potential violence of the truly mad.
- 75Boston GlobeJay CarrBoston GlobeJay CarrThere's a layer of grim comedy in Butterfly Kiss. But what's exciting about it is its gritty way of remaining so uncompromisingly bleak in its psychopathology. [7 Jun 1996, p.58]
- 70The New York TimesStephen HoldenThe New York TimesStephen HoldenWhere most movies portraying sociopathic behavior make some attempt at psychological explanation, Butterfly Kiss offers no background to Eunice's craziness. As she throws herself furiously through a bleak highway landscape of anonymous gas stations and convenience stores, she appears to be a self-created avenging demon radiating a powerful but loopy charisma.
- 67Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenAustin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenFor the first time in her film career, Plummer really owns the movie. Plummer's habitation of the character of Eunice in Butterfly Kiss is a creation that sears itself permanently into the viewer's consciousness, though it's possible that, ultimately, you may wish the memory to be quite otherwise.
- 38San Francisco ExaminerSan Francisco ExaminerAs titillating novelty turns into tired cliche, the dyke-psycho-killer genre may soon burn itself out, but in the meantime, we have the grim Brit art-film variation on the gruesome genre, Butterfly Kiss.