Avaliações do Metacritic

M. Butterfly does not take hold the way the stage play did.

M. Butterfly as idiosyncratic as Mr. Cronenberg's work always is, is sometimes too flat and ambiguous for its own good.

Despite the sheer gorgeousness, it ends up feeling false and, towards the end, rushed.

The movie, however, seems to make the wrong decision at almost every opportunity, trying for the kind of melodramatic tragedy that only works in opera.

Though carefully cast and set in the most exotic of locales, the drama lacks any real excitement, the director's glacial style aligning itself all too patly with Hwang's arid rhetoric.

Cronenberg directs this doomed romance in the same flat, claustrophobic, night-of-the-zombies style he employed in ''Naked Lunch''; as a dramatist, he's still stuck in Interzone.

The end result, while not entirely unrewarding, is another step away from the singular vision Cronenberg once expressed even in his marginal works.

M. Butterfly, the David Cronenberg film of David Henry Hwang's Broadway play, fumbles its romantic and political metaphors and loses the game.

The fundamental problems with David Cronenberg's disastrous 1993 adaptation, written by Hwang himself, are twofold: the unsuitability of such a premise for film, where the actors and audience no longer share the same space, and the miscasting of Jeremy Irons as the accountant and John Lone as the diva.

This butterfly just doesn't fly. Icy, surprisingly conventional and never truly convincing.