David Nusair Reel Film Reviews Mar 31, 2026 3/4

...a slow-moving yet mostly compelling drama that benefits from its stellar roster of players...

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Guy Lodge Observer (UK) Nov 25, 2025

It’s breath-catchingly pained and delicate in articulating estrangements and losses, aggravated by a November cold snap so tangibly felt in Frederick Elmes’s crisp, brittle cinematography and the icicle-tapping tones of Mychael Danna’s score.

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Matt Brunson Film Frenzy May 5, 2024 3.5/4

Even while nailing a specific period in time, it’s still able to transcend its setting and speak directly to modern folks who no longer find aesthetic pleasure in impossibly long sideburns.

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Stephen Silver Tilt Magazine Sep 30, 2022 4/5

In fact, just about everything sexual that happens in the film is dirty, unpleasant, unsatisfying, and led to pain and heartbreak for just about everyone involved (25th anniversary)

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Brian Eggert Deep Focus Review Feb 14, 2022 4/4

The Ice Storm contains a deeply human authenticity and willingness to portray, but not resolve, its characters' collective alienation.

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David Thomson Esquire Magazine Aug 12, 2020

Family life -- the real focus of The Ice Storm -- is rendered as having something like the alienating density of prison; each solitary feels enclosed in his or her own sentence and injustice.

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Tom Meek Cambridge Day Aug 7, 2020 3.5/4

The film's smartly told through the eyes of the children...

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Michael Atkinson Spin Oct 25, 2019

The key to The Ice Storm's ambiguity and unexpected depth is that the events of the story mean wholly different things to different characters -- there's no moral, just life sliced like a loaf of bread.

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Brian D. Johnson Maclean's Magazine Oct 11, 2019

Elegantly directed by Sense and Sensibility's Ang Lee, it frames the moral vacuity of the Seventies with cool, contemporary hindsight.

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Gene Siskel Chicago Tribune Mar 28, 2019 4/4

Nothing less than one of the year's best pictures, a portrait of wealthy Connecticut suburbanites in the 1970s whose lives have no emotional or spiritual rudder.

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David Ansen Newsweek Feb 27, 2018

The Ice Storm captures this place, this season, this garish and confused moment in history, with surgical precision...It's Lee's sympathetic detachment that gives the movie its paradoxical power.

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Jason Bailey Vice Oct 7, 2017

Among its many virtues, 'The Ice Storm' keenly captures the sheer, visceral terror of puberty-of grappling with these urges, trying to do what you think you're supposed to, and lashing out when you can't.

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David Stratton At the Movies (Australia) Feb 27, 2014

I think one of the things [Ang Lee] really specializes in is ensemble pieces like this one.

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Margaret Pomeranz At the Movies (Australia) Feb 27, 2014

What struck me about it was the fluidity and discipline of Lee's direction, the performances which captured so beautifully the confusion of that period of cultural and sexual evolution, and the compassion which I think is a feature of all of Lee's films.

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Brian Costello Common Sense Media Jun 12, 2013 5/5

Drug use and sexual content in Ang Lee masterpiece.

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Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly Sep 7, 2011 B+

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Michael Dequina TheMovieReport.com Feb 15, 2009 4/4

Beautifully nuanced, passionately performed, and terrifically realized piece of work.

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Maitland McDonagh TV Guide Nov 21, 2008 3/4

Beautifully acted, refreshingly un-camp in its take on wide lapels and progressive rock and occasionally coolly moving. It's just that ultimately, there's less here than meets the eye.

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Todd McCarthy Variety Jul 28, 2008

A well-observed and deftly performed examination of upper-middle-class emotional deep freeze...

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Arthur Ryel-Lindsey Slant Magazine Mar 24, 2008 3/4

As in any joke, destiny is a major character.

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