“A tale of sex, blood, and sacrilege”

“Verhoeven once again pushes all the buttons that will titillate, provoke, excite, offend and -- a quality he's maintained throughout the decades -- mix impudent and outrageous conceits with serious smarts..”

“’Benedetta’ is funny, ridiculous, sarcastic, sexy, and consistently compelling. That's the secret sauce here.”

“[A] gleefully lurid period-piece look at sapphic lust and religious rot.”

“Like ‘Elle’ or ‘Showgirls’ or even ‘Basic Instinct,’ ‘Benedetta’ is about a woman clawing her way to power in a male-dominated world, gradually finding her own voice and then achieving emancipation.”

“A substantial, sophisticated, yet briskly paced and always highly entertaining drama, which balances quiet scenes of shrewd backroom politicking with lurid scenes of wild religious madness.”

“Gleefully transgressive…a psychosexual Grand Guignol pretending, quite slyly, to be a stately period biopic.”