The Ice Storm

Name: The Ice Storm
Released: 1997-9-26
Cast: Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Henry Czerny, Adam Hann-Byrd, Tobey Maguire

The Ice Storm

R
1h 53m
1997

85%

age 17+

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When a self-centered husband's relationship with his wife and mistress grow cold, it takes a wife-swapping "key party" and a freak ice storm to clear the air and change their lives forever. With the help of an all star cast, Academy Award Winning director, Ang Lee, offers a compelling look at a controversial era.

Director:

Ang Lee

Producer:

Ted Hope, James Schamus, Ang Lee

Writer:

James Schamus, Rick Moody

Cast:

Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Henry Czerny, Adam Hann-Byrd, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Jamey Sheridan, Elijah Wood, Sigourney Weaver

Rotten Tomatoes® Score

TOMATOMETER®

85%

Critics Consensus: Director Ang Lee revisits the ennui-laden decadence of 1970s suburban America with deft humor and gripping pathos.

Reviews

Esquire Magazine

David Thomson

Family life -- the real focus of The Ice Storm -- is rendered as having something like the alienating density of prison; each solitary feels enclosed in his or her own sentence and injustice.

The film's smartly told through the eyes of the children...

The key to The Ice Storm's ambiguity and unexpected depth is that the events of the story mean wholly different things to different characters -- there's no moral, just life sliced like a loaf of bread.

Elegantly directed by Sense and Sensibility's Ang Lee, it frames the moral vacuity of the Seventies with cool, contemporary hindsight.

Nothing less than one of the year's best pictures, a portrait of wealthy Connecticut suburbanites in the 1970s whose lives have no emotional or spiritual rudder.

March 28, 2019

FULL REVIEW

Common Sense Media

age 17+

Common Sense Says

Drug use and sexual content in Ang Lee masterpiece.

What Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Ice Storm is a 1997 film based on the novel by Rick Moody; it's an unsparing, unsentimental story, set against the backdrop of Watergate-era malaise, about the implosion of an upper middle class family through extramarital affairs, excessive drinking, and drug use. While it's one of the best films from the 1990s, the teens and preteens in the film engage in drinking, pot smoking, pill taking, and sexual experimentation; while none of this is glamorized, the behavior makes this most suitable for older teens mature enough to see the teens' (and adults') behavior not as fodder for bad ideas to try on their own, but as characters in a movie caught up in the tenor of the times while falling apart through their questionable decisions. Parents also need to know that a major character is shown being electrocuted and that there's some minor profanity.