SOURCE: Simon, John. Review of Stealing Beauty, by Bernardo Bertolucci. National Review 48, no. 13 (15 July 1996): 52–53.

In the following review, Simon offers a negative assessment of Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty.

In 1972, well before its commercial release, Pauline Kael pronounced Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris the film that made “the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of reviewing. This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out the most liberating,” she wrote. “People will be arguing about it, I think, for as long as there are movies.” When did you last hear people arguing about Last Tango? If it is remembered at all, it is for Marlon Brando's use of a stick of butter to bugger Maria Schneider with.

From his first feature, The Grim Reaper, and first succès d'estime, Before the Revolution, Bertolucci looked to me like a three-lira bill. There...