Roger Ebert On Exposed

I was hoping to provide a direct link to Roger Ebert's original near four star review of EXPOSED as I think it was one of the best of Nastassja's career but for some reason the review is not available online. So I pulled out one of his old film guides and here are some select quotes from it. I often find myself disagreeing with Ebert and sometimes he makes me flat out angry but every so often he really hits one out of the park. I think his look at EXPOSED is one of his best reviews.

"This movie contains moments so exhilarating they reawakened me to the infinite possibilities of movies...EXPOSED contains the most exciting evidence yet that Nastassja Kinski is the next great female superstar. I do not say she is a great actress, not yet, and perhaps not ever. I do not compare her with Meryl Streep or Kate Nelligan, Jill Clayburgh or Jessica Lange. I am not talking in those terms of professional accomplishment. I am talking about the mysterious, innate quality that some performers have to cast a special spell, to develop a relationship with the camera that you can call stardom or voodoo or magic, because its name doesn't really matter.
Kinski has it. There are moments in this film (two virtuoso scenes, in particular, and then many other small moments and parts of scenes) when she affects me in the same way that Marilyn Monroe must have affected viewers, in movies like THE ASPHALT JUNGLE or ALL ABOUT EVE. She was not yet a star and audiences did not even know her name, but there was a quality about her that could not be dismissed. Kinski has that quality. She has exhibited it before in better films, such as TESS, and in ambitious, imperfect films such as CAT PEOPLE and ONE FROM THE HEART. Now here is EXPOSED...The sheer quality of Kinski's abandon in these two scenes (the solo dance and violin seduction) made me realize how many barriers can sometimes exist between a performer and an audience: Here there are none...
If a movie can electrify me the way this one did, not once but twice and then some, I'm prepared to forgive it almost anything."

Ebert shared the same frustration I did with the film, mainly that it falls apart in the end. The above quotes are just a few highlights. It is a passionate piece of writing and I always appreciated that he saw the same thing in Nastassja that I did. I don't know why this full review isn't on his site. I hope it appears one day, in the meantime the full review can be found in his pre 1990 MOVIE HOME COMPANION books.