In both [The Seduction of Mimi and Love and Anarchy] Wertmüller is concerned with the confrontation between social consciousness-mobility and personal desires, the battle between the mind and the heart, the linear, well-or-dered road to success, and the volatile and inner emotional world. Throughout the two films Wertmüller's camera seems in perpetual motion, closing in on the characters' wild dramatic postures and affectations…. Wertmüller's exuberance and visceral lust for the physically overripe gesture interprets Giannini's intellectual romantic dilemma as a minor but comically effective derivative of Stendahl's numerous studies of politics and passion. (pp. 51-2)

[In Love and Anarchy] Wertmüller makes all her points through an elaborate, Rubens-like setting; her camera fluency rarely provides a static, visual metaphor.

But something happens in All Screwed Up….

In All Screwed Up, the action is not so frantic or madcap. The comic nature of her work is...