| Writer, Director, Actor, The Secret Life of Arnold Bax (1992) |
| Ken Russell casts himself in the title role of his own film, The Secret Life of Arnold Bax, and gives a portrayal so dire that I suspect he may have had to perform sexual favours for himself on the casting couch in order to get the part. |
| (Victor Lewis-Smith) |
| Writer, Director, The Devils (1970) |
| As if the story weren't bizarre enough, Russell has spared nothing in hyping the historic events by stressing the grisly at the expense of dramatic unity. |
| (Variety) |
| Russell's swirling multi-colored puddle… made me glad that both Huxley and Whiting are dead, so that they are spared this farrago of witless exhibitionism. |
| (Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic) |
| A garish glossary of sado-masochism… a taste for visual sensation that makes scene after scene look like the masturbatory fantasies of a Roman Catholic boyhood. |
| (Alexander Walker, Evening Standard) |
| Russell's film takes a quantum leap from his abominable The Music Lovers into a dung heap. I shall refrain from saying more because, not having a degree in sanitary engineering, I don't know how to review a cesspool. |
| (John Simon, New Leader) |
| Ken Russell doesn't report hysteria, he markets it. |
| (Pauline Kael, New Yorker) |
| Writer, Director, Mahler (1974) |
| Whether the title of the opus happens to be Strauss or Tchaikowsky or Elgar or Brubeck, the real title is always Russell. |
| (Benny Green, Punch) |
| Vulgarity so self-confident, so unrepentant wins a kind of horrified respect. Ken Russell stands on his own, a mixture, at once frightening and preposterous, of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Hieronymus Bosch and the propaganda-poster artists of the Third Reich. |
| (Dilys Powell, Sunday Times) |
| Collectors of supreme cinematic monstrosities had better keep a sharp look-out for Ken Russell's latest. The film is in such demented and rotten taste that I do not wish to waste much space on it. |
| (John Simon, Esquire) |
| Made for a class of rowdy boys who must be kept attentive by sequences of rampant fantasy and rankest vulgarity. |
| (Alexander Walker, Evening Standard) |
| Exuberant but supremely vulgar. If there's ever a Society For The Preservation of Famous People's Reputations, Russell's in for a lot of trouble. |
| (Steven H. Scheuer) |
| Writer, Director, Actor, Whore (1991) |
| Ken Russell's stylised, straight-at-camera presentation is even more hectoring than usual. His glossy primary colours clash with the seediness of the subject-matter, giving it a strip-cartoon feeling, made even more crass by execrable dialogue, cardboard characters and situations which are crudely introduced and ineptly staged. Ken Russell himself plays a waiter with grotesque incompetence. |
| (Chris Tookey, Sunday Telegraph) |
