In both [The Seduction of Mimi and Love and Anarchy] Wertmüller is concerned with the confrontation between social consciousness-mobility and personal desires, the battle between the mind and the heart, the linear, well-or-dered road to success, and the volatile and inner emotional world. Throughout the two films Wertmüller's camera seems in perpetual motion, closing in on the characters' wild dramatic postures and affectations…. Wertmüller's exuberance and visceral lust for the physically overripe gesture interprets Giannini's intellectual romantic dilemma as a minor but comically effective derivative of Stendahl's numerous studies of politics and passion. (pp. 51-2)

[In Love and Anarchy] Wertmüller makes all her points through an elaborate, Rubens-like setting; her camera fluency rarely provides a static, visual metaphor.

But something happens in All Screwed Up….

In All Screwed Up, the action is not so frantic or madcap. The comic nature of her work is toned down….

Wertmüller's dramatic form is much more cryptic in All Screwed Up…. Wertmüller has stopped laughing at the world; she adopts a black humor perspective that no longer empathizes with her characters and the conflict between their emotional makeup and the grim, nonsensical rules and regulations they must abide by.

The battle of the sexes is seldom juxtaposed to the mores of family or church. Wertmüller, instead, ridicules the characters' grotesque attempts to secure happiness….

But Wertmüller's descent into a modern hell is not radical enough in attacking the mythos of the "big city"; one does not sense the moral outrage so poignantly described in Celine's novels, or the cunning ploys of Brecht's work. Her emotional and stylistic commitment is no longer to the little guy, to the antihero whose zest for life will, if not neutralize the institution or environment he does battle with, put up one helluva of a performance before the curtain comes down. (p. 52)

Wertmüller has considerably sharpened her brush strokes, but instead of a more acute, piercing color and form, All Screwed Up seems to have been drawn with pincers….

If All Screwed Up is a slight but morally critical jump in perspective and tone, Swept Away is a gargantuan leap from the world of Sennet's bathing beauties and mustachioed cops and robbers to Shaw's verbal demagogues, or those who render unto their native language what is naturally considered the province of God….

Wertmüller has moved into the genre of social satire made famous from Sheridan to Shaw without providing the subtle cadences in speech and character development that is so abundant in English theater. Instead of the humorously contradictory meanings ascribed to the rakes and rich men, the idealists and the exploiters, the virtuous whores and the pretending virgins, the first part of Swept Away consists of Melato's petulantly dull harangues and Giannini's hound-dog mournfulness….

Wertmüller treats the battle of the sexes with all the passion of a mortician looking at gonads in a bottle of ethyl alcohol….

[Seven Beauties] is a much more ambitious film than Swept Away: it assimilates so many problems and personalities that nothing less than a Joycean (or Bachian) superstructure could contain its sundry motifs….

In this film Wertmüller is attempting one of the grandest and most dangerous ironies ever committed in the name of film art: she is wagering everything on her antihero Pasqualino, who is not heroic, intelligent or tragic by nature….

The irony is greatly compounded by the film's encyclopedic scope. Though it erroneously jumps back and forth in time and could have gained some clarity and force had the plot been developed in a straightforward manner, the awesomeness of the story is still readily apparent. From his initial decision to defend his sister's honor through his conquering of the commandant and her ensuing belittlement of Pasqualino, Wertmüller's story is that of the decline and fall of our civilization—not through the eyes of a Faustian figure or a Sancho Panza little guy, but the "face in the crowd."…

Whereas we laughed both with and at her protagonists in The Seduction of Mimi and Love and Anarchy, we are now dealing with a much more ponderous subject. And we must ultimately reject Seven Beauties as "the" socio-comic parody of our fall: neither the comedy nor the pain we experience is sufficiently nihilistic to make us cry out at this mirror image of our past. (p. 54)

Wertmüller has settled for a stultifying symbolic design that offers a veneer of reality but that, in essence, makes it easier for Pasqualino to be seen as a "survivor," or even worse, as Wilhelm Reich's "Little Man." The fact is, however, that Pasqualino is neither. (p. 56)