The portentous invocation of Catholic guilt and psychotically split personality couldn't be clearer if 'Madonna and Whore' had also been laid out in blinking neon.

What makes the film ... so fascinating and repellent at once is precisely the confusion and anxiety it articulates about women's sexual freedom.

In Looking for Mr Goodbar, writer-director Richard Brooks manifests his ability to catch accurately both the tone and subtlety of characters in the most repellant environments.

Brooks’s film weighs the promises of emancipation against the persistence of heterosexual norms and delivers a crushing verdict.