Stephen Farber

“Still, at a time when most movies try so little, there’s something to be said for a movie that tries to do too much. Some of Dassin’s indiscriminately aimed darts manage to hit the bull’s eye. Mercouri is more restrained than usual, and she has riveting moments… However, the most effective moments belong to Ellen Burstyn as the simple, uneducated housewife who went berserk when she learned that her husband planned to leave her for a younger woman. Burstyn makes the monstrous comprehensible. In contemplating the tragedy of a woman who built her life around her husband, we feel both pity and terror. In its horrific, extreme way the film reflects all the recent questioning of the religion of domesticity. The flashback sequence of Burstyn’s murder of her children is shattering, but it’s a sure-fire scene, one that couldn’t miss. The same might be said of the film as a whole: The sheer power of the subject overrides the awkwardness of the execution. Although A Dream of Passion is riddled with flaws, you won’t forget that you’ve seen it.”

Stephen Farber
New West, November 6, 1978

David Denby

“…. [Dassin] involves his actress heroine with an imprisoned American woman (Ellen Burstyn) who has murdered her little children as a way of punishing her American husband for having an affair with a Greek woman. A real Medea--savage and desperate."

"Ellen Burstyn is at her best in this role. Her anger is fully focused; she stays completely in character. Burstyn's murderess is a small-town fundamentalist, semi-psychotic, terrified of God, but still disgusted with her adulterous husband. Shaken by the fury and violence of this woman, Mercouri begins to lose her grip....”

David Denby
New York, November 13, 1978

Stanley Kauffmann

“Ellen Burstyn gives an intelligently wrought performance as the religiously fanatic murdering mother….”

Stanley Kauffmann
New Republic, November 4, 1978
(from my note card)