Not all of it works, but you play along, because it's rare to find a film this ambitious.

[Figgis's] most venturesome, most personal - and least accessible film to date. If you open your mind and trust him completely, it's possible to experience the wrenching impact of this ravishingly beautiful and highly distinctive film.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is not a masterpiece (at times, its obtuseness can seem ponderous and pretentious), it is nevertheless a fascinating experience, with the focus being on the artistic elements inherent in the medium rather than on the narrative.

It's visually stunning, especially in scenes of the African countryside, and takes more risks than most independent films.

The nonlinear story consists of loosely linked fragments, some more effective than others, threaded together in a broodingly poetic way.

Much of it is risible, yet I loved watching it -not because I thought that the emperor was wearing new clothes but because I thought he looked fine - beautiful, actually - naked. Figgis' camera is probing and alive, so that even when his meanings are laughable, his images remain allusive and mysterious.

There's some darn poignant stuff going on here.... The problem is that the audience will try to connect everything to the explicit Eden analogy, and not everything will. The director wins points for enticing you to figure it out, though, and I did enjoy it.

Boasting sublime imagery, but no characters to ground his reverie, the new pic heavily relies on an opaque narrative and elliptical editing.

It's one of those woozy Jungian art jobs, a series of elliptical, nearly wordless vignettes that are meant to strike a universal symbolist chord. Director Mike Figgis frames the movie with his baroquely contemporary documentary-like version of the Fall.

It's beautiful to look at, and marvelously edited, but it's hard to know exactly what he's getting at. [28 May 1999]

Much of the film is a nearly wordless tone poem that sustains an intense emotional gravity and sexual tension through its mixture of music, beautiful outdoor cinematography and somber, silent acting.

There's not much of a spell to The Loss of Sexual Innocence, which is a shame, because anything this moody and pretty ought to be spellbinding. [16 Jul 1999]

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is not bad, as in the sense of inept; it's artful enough to show how truly trite it is.

The absence of substance, or its banishment, and the director's reliance on allure (in the film's casting and in its look and sound, which features haunting music by Beethoven and Chopin), leave Innocence with the quasi-profound, giggly overreach of a magazine layout come to shameless, shallow life.