SOURCE: Kauffmann, Stanley. “Close Encounters of the First Kind.” New Republic 220, no. 25 (21 June 1999): 30.

In the following excerpt, Kauffmann offers a negative assessment of Besieged, arguing that the film's “vacuity” is “shocking.”

Tough times for Bernardo Bertolucci. When he began making films, in the early 1960s, he was one of the young surfers riding the Italian postwar tide, which had been generated by such older figures as Rossellini and De Sica. Bertolucci's Before the Revolution, his second film but his first to be seen here, had the paradoxical design that marked the work of Olmi and Pasolini, the sense of breaking free of convention at the same time that the film followed a careful plan. Bertolucci clearly owed much to older masters, but Before the Revolution sustained, movingly, the contradictory blend of angry despair and smoldering aspiration that was a signet of the time. To tag Bertolucci a Marxist...