Unfaithful (Widescreen) (2002)

USA Today
"...[Lane] reaches a new career plateau..." 05/08/2002 p.6D

New York Times
"...UNFAITHFUL has a taut, economical screenplay..." 05/08/2002 p.E1

USA Today
"...Filmed both sensually and thoughtfully, thanks in part to a performance by Diane Lane that gracefully turns from forcefully sensual to weary..." 05/10/2002 p.12D

Rolling Stone
"...Lane is a force of nature. Her slow-burning, fiercely erotic performance charges the movie..." 06/06/2002 p.84

Variety
"...Lane serves up a compulsively watchable performance....[Martinez] is smoothly convincing..." 05/06/2002 p.41-6

Entertainment Weekly
"...Sensational sex-and-its-consequences melodrama....Lane, in the most urgent performance of her career, is a revelation..." 05/17/2002 p.50

Wall Street Journal
"The film is Ms. Lane's from start to finish; she gives a sensationally fine performance." 10/23/2009

Entertainment Today 8 of 10
...a true study, a film with a questioning heart and mind that isn't afraid to admit it doesn't have all the answers. - Brent Simon
 
Chicago Sun-Times 8 of 10
The heart has its reasons, said the French philosopher Pascal, quoted by the American philosopher Woody Allen. It is a useful insight when no other reasons seem apparent. Connie Sumner's heart and other organs have their reasons for straying outside a happy marriage in "Unfaithful,'' but the movie doesn't say what they are. This is not necessarily a bad thing, sparing us tortured Freudian explanations and labored plot points. It is almost always more interesting to observe behavior than to listen to reasons...Connie (Diane Lane) and her husband, Edward (Richard Gere), live with their 9-year-old son, Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan), in one of those Westchester County houses that has a room for every mood. They are happy together, or at least the movie supplies us with no reasons why they are unhappy...The movie was directed by Adrian Lyne, best known for higher-voltage films like "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Proposal.'' This film is based on "La Femme Infidele" (1969) by Claude Chabrol, which itself is an update of Madame Bovary. Lyne's film is juicier and more passionate than Chabrol's, but both share the fairly daring idea of showing a plot that is entirely about illicit passion and its consequences in a happy marriage. Although cops turn up from time to time in "Unfaithful," this is not a crime story, but a marital tragedy. Richard Gere and Diane Lane are well-suited to the roles, exuding a kind of serene materialism that seems happily settled in suburbia. It is all the more shocking when Lane revisits Martel's apartment because there is no suggestion that she is unhappy with Gere, starved for sex, or especially impulsive. She goes back up there because--well, because she wants to. He's quite a guy. On one visit he shows her The Joy of Cooking in Braille. And then his fingers brush hers as if he's reading The Joy of Sex on her skin. - Roger Ebert
 
ReelViews 7 of 10
Adrian Lyne must have a fascination for examining the ins and outs of marital infidelity. Unfaithful, Lyne's first outing since the controversial Lolita, follows in the distant wake of Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal. In some ways, Unfaithful (based on Calude Chabrol's superior La Femme Infidele, which was a re-telling of "Madame Bovary") is the least complicated of the three, but the moral is the same: extra-marital sex, regardless of the underlying reasons, is a bad idea. As one character in this movie suggests, it may all start as fun and games, but, once it moves past a one-night stand, it will inevitably end badly for one or both parties...The first two-thirds of Unfaithful are an interesting, if at times overwrought, look at how a seemingly happily-married woman can fall into an affair, and how she copes with leading a double life. She loves her son and husband, but craves the other man. For a while, the clandestine nature of this relationship is blissful, but there comes a time when complications begin to surface - she becomes careless, forgets to pick up her son after school, and tells lies that are easily disproved. Her husband becomes suspicious. That's when Unfaithful takes an unfortunate turn down a blind alley that leads to lurid melodrama...I would almost be willing to recommend Unfaithful as a guilty pleasure if not for the final forty minutes. I hate it when screenplays take the easy way out, and that's what happens here. After the plot's big turning point, the movie loses its focus and can't decide whether it wants to be a melodrama or a crime thriller. The ending is ambiguous in all the wrong ways, and comes across as a cheat more than anything else. (I had a feeling, based on the way the closing scene was edited, that something was coming that didn't happen - it may have ended up on the cutting room floor.) The good points about Unfaithful can't overcome the movie's eventual downward spiral. - James Berardinelli