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Basic Instinct

1992

Paul Verhoeven

Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George Dzundza, Jeanne Tripplehorn ...

6.5

69,462

Thriller. Mystery The take-no-prisoners sex thriller from 1992 now stands as a milestone in the career of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, but in the hands of director Paul Verhoeven Basic Instinct is an undeniably stylish and provocative study of obsession. In the role that made her a star (and showed the audience a little more skin than she intended), Sharon Stone plays the cleverly manipulative novelist Catherine Tramell who snares San Francisco detective ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Janet Maslin The New York Times	"'Basic Instinct' transfers Mr. Verhoeven's flair for action-oriented material to the realm of Hitchcockian intrigue, and the results are viscerally effective even when they don't make sense"	POS
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"What makes Basic Instinct a guilty pleasure is the shameless and stylish way Verhoeven lets rip with his own basic instinct for disreputably alluring entertainment"	POS
United States	Terrence Rafferty The New Yorker	"A vicious, grindingly manipulative urban mystery that uses a thick atmosphere of S&M kinkiness to distract the audience from the story's thinness and inanity."	NEG
United States	Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times	"The film is like a crossword puzzle. It keeps your interest until you solve it (...) Rating: ★★ (out of 4)"	NEU
United States	Variety Staff Variety	"['Basic Instinct'] rivets attention through its sleek style, attractive cast doing and thinking kinky things, and story, which is as weirdly implausible as it is intensely visceral."	POS
United States	Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly	"Beneath its heavy-breathing fripperies, the movie is mechanical and routine"	NEG
Canada	The Globe and Mail	"A perverse, lame-brained thriller that is pornographic, misogynist and homophobic. If that makes it sound appealing, I should also add that it's silly, boring and intellectually insulting."	NEG

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