SOURCE: Bowie, Malcolm. “Rites of Passage Romp.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4626 (29 November 1991): 21.

In the following review, Bowie asserts that although Valmont is visually stunning, the film is ultimately a sterile adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses.

What will Milos Forman do next?, cinema-goers were entitled to ask themselves during the long years of silence that followed Amadeus. Forman's career had been Protean, after all, and the gulf between, say, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the Shaffer adaptation was perhaps even more remarkable than the caesura that the Soviet tanks had inserted between his early Czech-language films and the later English series. The surprise with Valmont, based on Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses and now released in Britain after a delay of two years, is that there is no surprise: hard on the heels of one big-budget costume drama with a late eighteenth-century setting comes another of the same...