With the Milan Kundera novel as his source, Philip Kaufman has managed to fashion a purebred European film without subtitles, and this is bound to lend him a new sort of cachet in some people's eyes. Besides which, like The Right Stuff before it, it's three hours long: it must be an epic. Even if, again like The Right Stuff, it doesn't look or feel much like an epic. More like a mess. It contains a great deal of sex and skin, on good literary authority (or in other words, under the banner of "Lady Chatterley Sí"), all of it pretty chilly and undermotivated, with Daniel Day-Lewis as the most smirkily self-confident lady-killer since Roger Moore. (If "Take off your clothes" doesn't do the trick, "I'm a doctor" will clinch it.) And to make the "hot" stuff go down healthfully, the rest of it is a 32 oz. vegetable smoothie made up of aesthetics, metaphysics, politics (ca. Czechoslovakia, 1968), dreams, fantasies, facetious chapter headings, newsreel footage, simulated newsreel footage, Sven Nykvist, satirical bureaucrats, obese commoners, Erland Josephson, and a dog named for Anna Karenina. Thank heaven, at least, for Sven Nykvist. And the dog. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.