“A MASTERPIECE OF AMERICAN CINEMA. The onscreen melo boils, but Stahl's gaze remains spare and precise,
like an acidic fusion of Ozu and Naruse. The glamour of the film's palette is but a bandage on a festering canker...
God is in the details, but he remains tauntingly at the margins.”
– Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York
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"STAGGERINGLY BEAUTIFUL... There's neither a bland nor trivial frame in the whole thing.
And it was perhaps never more gorgeous since its release than it is now, in the wonderful restoration at Film Forum.
A strangely heartening reminder of just how exhilaratingly bizarre Hollywood moviemaking could get!”
– Glenn Kenny, The Auteurs
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“Stahl's purpose unfolds only on the big screen, where the blue-velvet skies and the lethally smooth waters
acquire the unquestioned clarity of a fever dream. Color is the lifeblood of the film, Stahl takes the time to feel his way
into the more vivid hues of the heart... Technicolor reaches its astounding apogee in the lips of Gene Tierney, as red as a witch's apple.
Each frame of her seems to be hand-tinted.”
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
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"GENE TIERNEY IS THE FATALEST OF FEMMES IN THIS GORGEOUSLY RESTORED CLASSIC!
Stahl's use of space and the performances, suggest he was at least the equal of the much-exalted Sirk as an artist of melodrama.”
– Lou Lumenick, The New York Post
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"GORGEOUSLY RESTORED... Leave Her to Heaven redefines mauve.
Gene Tierney is one of cinema's most chilling psychopaths... whose twisted scheming remains unparalleled.”
– Melissa Anderson, Village Voice
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“A marvelous, highly stylized melodrama.
The Technicolor photography gives the film the lurid look of a hothouse orchid. Simply amazes!”
– Stephen Whitty, The Star-Ledger
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"One of the great Hollywood melodramas of the 1940s!”
– Elliott Stein, Village Voice

"SPECTACULAR! Pure drama and pure cine noir, all at the same time, with brilliant, deceptive photography
which knocks the spectator out when he discovers that those pastel shades conceal vast amounts of madness and sordidness.
A forerunner of Sirk, but more turbulent... The most frightening film that cinema has given us about the evil of jealousy.”
– Pedro Almodóvar

(1945) Always elegantly coiffed Gene Tierney (in Oscar-nominated role and fresh from her starring role in Preminger’s Laura) and best-selling author Cornel Wilde meet cute — she’s reading his latest book — in a super-luxurious railroad car lounge and, despite her engagement ring, it’s instant attraction. And next thing Wilde knows, he’s on horseback watching as she strews her father’s ashes on a New Mexico mountaintop — as Alfred Newman’s score thunders — and suddenly, he’s the new fiancé of someone with a very possessive passion. Big Mistake? A drowning coldly watched from behind the screen’s most menacing pair of sunglasses, a miscarriage via intentional staircase fall, a death by poison, and a murder trial with a very surprising defendant getting hammered by relentless DA/spurned lover Vincent Price ensue, amid splendiferous settings, all viewed via sumptuous, Oscar-winning photography by Fox Technicolor specialist Leon Shamroy. Screenplay by Jo Swerling (Man’s Castle and other Depression films), with a colorful cast including Jeanne Crain, Ray Collins (Citizen Kane, Perry Mason), and Darryl Hickman. Restored by the Academy Film Archive in cooperation with Twentieth Century Fox, with funding provided by The Film Foundation. Approx. 110 min.

“Wonderful all-stops-out melodrama drawing luridly on gimcrack psychology. The potential for absurdity is enormous, but Stahl is totally in control, his precise pacing and compositions lending a persuasive dimension of amour fou, while Shamroy's camerawork makes each image a purring pleasure on the eye.”
– Tom Milne, Time Out (London)

“Veteran proto-Sirkian melodramatist extraordinaire Stahl creates this most propulsive tale of daddy-complex jealousy. Has any woman ever looked more awfully gorgeous than when Tierney casts her father's ashes across her chest in that luridly empurpled and incestuous consecration?”
– Guy Maddin

“Nothing I’ve seen in a cinema is more beautiful, more depthless, yet more impenetrable than the emerald eyes of Ellen Berent, one of the most compelling characters of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Tierney embodies a femme fatale far more magnificent and malignant than film noir’s garden variety. This extraordinary 35mm restoration features some of the most astounding Technicolor imagery you will ever see.”
– Eddie Muller, San Francisco International Film Festival

“A mad goddess creation. That Ellen should still be understandable owes a lot to the Swerling script, to Tierney’s natural warmth, and to Stahl’s direction. A very fine example of Technicolor as a source of unruly passion—the colors of hair, lipstick, and skin are like paint. If you need a proof of how Technicolor fueled films, this is the one to quote.”
– David Thomson

“The American family melodrama at its most neurotic. Stahl's film is so lurid that it seems to exist on another plane of reality. Has its own kind of fascination and power... the artificial brightness of the 40s color adds yet another level of abstraction—the actors seem enameled against the backgrounds.”
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“Tierney, one of the most ravishingly beautiful — and most underrated — actresses in film history, shines. Whether one calls it film noir, women’s film, shameless potboiler, gaudy kitsch, or what-have-you, Leave Her to Heaven is one of the best Hollywood films of the 1940s — one that showed (inner) pitch-black shadows looming in even the brightest corners of the 'safe for peace' post-World War II period.”
– Alternative Film Guide

“As cutting an indictment of repression as anything by Ingmar Bergman.”
– Brian Darr, Green Cine