“The take-off and landing are a bit bumpy,” writes The Playlist‘s Oliver Lyttleton from Venice, “but most of David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method is fearsomely smart. It’s a grown-up, absorbing film that doesn’t forget to move you even as it fires up the synapses, and one of real substance (certainly more so than the enjoyable, but somewhat hollow Eastern Promises). It examines the creative and destructive elements of sexuality in a way that very few filmmakers would dare

“If anything keeps it from quite hitting the heights that it could, it’s Christopher Hampton‘s scripting.

Variety‘s Justin Chang also admires Cronenberg’s film, but with reservations.

“Cronenberg’s career-long fascination with matters of the mind manifests itself in compelling but determinedly non-mind-bending fashion in A Dangerous Method. An elegant, coolly restrained account of the friendship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and its ultimate undoing by a brilliant female patient-student who came between them, this complex story from the early days of psychoanalysis engrosses and even amuses as it unfolds through a series of conversations, treatment sessions and exchanged letters.

“Still, the absence of gut-level impact and talky approach to rarefied material mark it as one of Cronenberg’s more specialized entries, destined for a small but appreciative audience. ”