This is a first-rate piece of work by a director who’s daring and agile. The unfussiness of Frears’ approach is tonic. The movie gets at the important things and doesn’t linger over them. It’s heaven -- alive in a way that movies of classics rarely are.

A decadent celebration of wanton cruelty.

This incisive study of sex as an arena for manipulative power games takes too long to catch fire and suffers from a deficient central performance.

The trouble in "Dangerous Liaisons" is that its talented American cast seems totally at sea in coping with the pre-French Revolution aristocrats they're struggling to portray.