filmmaking. It is possible to be against political torture and still dislike this film? I think it is." He concluded: "The film would have been truer to itself and the real world if at the end the man had simply executed her." Janet Maslin of The New York Times was mixed. She said of the directing and writing: "Miss Bharadwaj, whose film also calls to mind avant-garde department store windows and Calvin Klein's television ads, sets forth her story with no acknowledgement that it is so excruciating, obvious or small. The result is something much more remarkable for its overconfidence than in any other regard." She pointed out that while the writing is poor, the acting talent outshines it, praising the performances: "The two actors in this claustrophobic debacle are somewhat better than their material." She complimented the mise en scene created by Eiko Ishioka, calling the sets and costumes "welcome distractions." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film zero stars out of four and said that Madeleine Stowe and Alan Rickman "are fine, forceful actors, but they can't convince us that we're seeing more than a sermon wrapped in a film of stupefying artifice. By talking at us instead of to us, Closet Land locks us out." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly was unimpressed with the film, saying: The minutes crawl by during this fancifully abstract two-character piece ... The movie, which has the feel of some didactic Off Off Broadway production left over from 1972, is set entirely in one gray marble room — a kind of stylized Bauhaus torture chamber. The moral scheme is, to put it mildly, basic: Closet Land is squarely on the side of innocent women who write children's books and squarely against the vile fascist monsters who torture them. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times was the most negative, calling the film a "porno chic." He said: "It is impossible to imagine how Radha Bharadwaj's Closet Land is going to do much good for the cause of human rights in general, and the oppression of women in particular. Surely, anyone with the slightest degree of awareness of what's going on in the world knows of the horrible plight of political prisoners subjected to unspeakable torture. Consequently, why should anyone subject himself or herself to this pretentious and contrived two-person drama, which punishes the audience rather than enlightens it?" He criticised the