Allen's association with [Interiors] has distracted the critics. We read essays wondering why a great comedian should make a movie without a laugh in it or why a Jew should make a drama about a WASP family. All this is surely irrelevant. Interiors deserves, like any other movie, to be considered on its intrinsic merits.

Let us therefore purge Woody Allen from our minds and approach Interiors as if it had been written by the unknown but gifted X. For the real test is what one would say about it if one never knew that Woody Allen had any connection with it. And the first point a reviewer might well make is that it is a movie about a divorce….

Interiors is certainly the first in a long time to take a hard, close look at this nerve-wracking chapter in so many American lives….

The movie is occasionally too pat, as when the most hostile daughter is saved from drowning by her stepmother's kiss of life. But it is generally superb in its exactness of observation and its breadth of sympathy. I have seen no movie that explores the impact of divorce with such sensitivity to the dilemmas of everyone involved….

Nor has Woody Allen—that name can't be excluded altogether—lost his satiric touch. The pseudo-intellectual cant he has used before to comic effect he uses to dramatic effect here, and his ear is as precise and devastating as ever. Of course his direction has been influenced by Ingmar Bergman. Why not? No one objected when movies were made, for example, in the manner of Lubitsch; and Bergman is a pretty good influence if your object is to render presumably civilized adults under acute emotional stress. Interiors seemed to me a remarkably intelligent movie. The unknown X has a considerable talent for high seriousness.