A ★★★★★ review of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

This movie is an adaptation of a three-hour play, so there's rather a lot of talking in it and it goes by pretty fast, such that around an hour in you might have lost track of time somewhat and start to think: "Oh, everyone in this movie is about as sloshed as can be—this whole thing must be winding down. What a nice little eight-hander of a movie, just a locked room and four people going at it." And then they get into a car to go get even more sloshed. In the midcentury they had levels of drunkenness that we can no longer access. The way weed is now is how gin was in 1966. What ensues in the second half of this movie is a whipsawing emotional struggle session in which every other word out of someone's mouth is a terrible betrayal and then the next word reconstructs whatever alliance they just busted up. It's horrifying. Heterosexuality as a torture-maze of mutual annihilation. More in common with Michael Haneke's Funny Games than with its own contemporaries.