Wertmuller's best work to date, such films as Seven Beauties, All Screwed Up, The Seduction of Mimi … had superb vigor, the zest of real assurance and real skill, and a rococo filigree that she had learned from Fellini…. Most of her film-making energies are in [The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain], too, but unlike her past work, they are not applied to very much. Here we get little more than the energies….

The picture begins and ends, as the title implies, in the marriage bed, with a number of flashbacks and excursions to explain what led up to it and what [the couple's] relations are. The story as such could hardly be more stale, but what keeps reminding us of its staleness is the lack of characterization. We get lots of (reminiscent) furiously romantic scenes … and we got a...