A Room with a View

Stunning cast and scenery cannot fill the hole where the heart of this film should be. A satire with an unnaturally soft centre. Read full review

The final scene, a ravishing in a room, with a view, as the bells of Florence chime out, would leave only a stone unmoved. Read full review

A virtually irresistible film. [21 March 1986, p.1]

Ivory glides his players through magnificent Italian and English landscapes and in drawing rooms that breathe authenticity. Two scenes are unforgettable: when the two lovers witness a violent stabbing scene in the Florence piazza; and when the heroine, her mother and fiance encounter three of the male characters in an innocent nude frolic in a wooded pond. [1 May 1986]

More than a great love story. It's both a lighthearted and deeply impassioned inspirational lesson about life. [4 April 1986]

A Room with a View enjoys its storytelling so much that I enjoyed the very process of it. The story moved slowly, it seemed, for the same reason you try to make ice cream last: because it's so good. Read full review

A movie with exquisite period detail. [8 Apr 1994]

And as Lucy, 19-year-old newcomer Helena Bonham Carter (whose great grandfather was British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith) is like a charming, flustered Alice grown up into the more dangerous wonderland of reality. [10 March 1986, p.74]

Room With a View, with its genteel cliches and its mouth-puckering social commentary, will absolutely please. It is a gorgeous, glimmering film adaptation of E.M. Forster's sweetest novel, an affectionate study of a party of English gone globetrotting, their Baedekers held close like talismans. [4 Apr 1986, p.29]

Two cheers, at least, for permitting the past to appear not as a stern lesson but as a delicious irrelevance. [10 Mar 1986]

Distinguished by superb ensemble acting, intelligent writing and stunning design.

Perhaps the primary reason A Room With a View is so involving is that Ivory has cast the film perfectly, and given each of the actors ample room to breathe. Even the characters you're not supposed to like are allowed their moments of vulnerable humanity.

As Lucy Honeychurch, Miss Bonham Carter gives a remarkably complex performance of a young woman who is simultaneously reasonable and romantic, generous and selfish, and timid right up to the point where she takes a heedless plunge into the unknown. Read full review

A Room with a View is a masterful example of how to take well-regarded literary source material, render it in a manner that displays the visual markers of middlebrow sophistication, like ornamental costume design and fine-tuned “art direction,” as the Oscars like to call it, and intersperse it with surface-level controversies, like three heterosexual men chasing each other around a pond with their dicks out. Read full review

Ivory's version of A Room With a View is impeccably turned out and wonderfully funny once the rhythms are established, which does not take long. The performances are splendid, from Helena Bonham Carter's moon-faced Lucy to the Cecil of Daniel Day Lewis (who can also be seen in a role so different -- the loutish punk of My Beautiful Laundrette -- that it hardly seems possible he is the same actor). As expected, Maggie Smith (as Charlotte) and Denholm Elliott (George's free-thinking father), nearly steal the film. [4 Apr 1986, p.D1]

It's hard to believe A Room With a View cost so little; the costumes and sets are dazzling and the acting is superb--from two-time Oscar-winner Smith to the smallest role, there's not a false note. Read full review

It's all rather amusing, but after awhile you tire of all the perfect little nuances about characters who seem like prototypes for a certain type of Victorian novel. [6 Mar 1986, p.23(E)]

It's enjoyably trivial – a piece of charming foolishness. [24 Mar 1986, p.112]

If amusing, A Room With a View is little more than a lark, a series of skits, a two-hour tribute to the rich British eccentric. Read full review

Bonham Carter is like an undergraduate in a university production who seems rather good considering that her performance is only an intelligent diversion while she prepares herself for a career in another field. [24 Mar 1986]

Though it's meant as a droll comedy of manners, what emerges is mincing, crabbed, and petty. Read full review