Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

The critic praises the film as the ravishing apotheosis of classic romantic cinema and the woman’s melodrama, highlighting its opulent yet austere style and exploration of transformative, often destructive love. She singles out the central performance by Joan Fontaine and Ophüls’s masterful use of tracking shots and music for particular praise.

The critic praises Ophüls's florid, extravagant direction as creating a melodramatic perfect storm around the thwarted lovers. The amusement park date scene and the film's subjective point of view are singled out for particular admiration.

The rerelease offers a luxurious swathe of emotion in this gripping and tragic story of unrequited passion spanning a decade in fin-de-siècle Vienna. The melodrama is fashioned to perfection with gorgeous recreation of the city and vivid performances.

Ophüls's melodrama is heartbreaking and uplifting, with luscious visual audacity and swooping camerawork that matches the vertiginous story of doomed romance in turn-of-the-century Vienna.

The critic calls it a grand, heartbreaking masterpiece that resonates with sad, simple truths about love and beauty. They single out the opulent design, sweeping fluid camerawork and devastating central performances.

Ophüls sees into the depths that surfaces so subtly suggest through his bravura camerawork and decorative sense, conjuring an exquisitely calibrated romanticism. The subject is the essence of character as it can be discerned from appearances.

Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan turn in splendid performances in difficult parts. Max Ophuls’ direction holds the story together with a leisurely pace, little touches of warmth and heart, and an artistic flavor that captures early-day Vienna.

The re-release of this gorgeously tragic 1948 melodrama serves as nice Valentine’s Day counter-programming, with Joan Fontaine as the woman whose love for the dashing cad leads to her downfall.

The film is an obvious onslaught on the heart-strings, heavy with wistfulness and pseudo-Viennese schmaltz. It is over-written with rhetoric and tommy-rot, though Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan make a pleasant romantic unit.

The critic calls it a beautifully shot and involving tragic classic, a three-tissue melodrama set in early 20th-century Vienna. She praises Joan Fontaine's understated performance as the devoted obsessive and notes the film's convincing leads and comic cameos, while finding the ending somewhat over-redemptive and over-the-top.