“With Amadeus and his earlier Equus, Peter Shaffer has been lucky in the often disappointing business of transforming stage plays into films. The long-running Broadway success Equus, originally staged as a stylized and austere Noh drama, is rendered into a highly explicit and realistic form by Lumet, thereby dispelling any illusions that the story, based on fact, has some non-literal, symbolic significance. The film traces the descent of a young stableboy (Peter Strang) into madness, showing how primal sexual and religious drives come to be shaped into a private religion. Through vivid visual images and intense dialogue, the viewer is lured into an intuitive grasp of the psychic logic that culminates in an incomprehensible and gruesome act. Richard Burton in one of his finest performances plays a tired, middle-aged psychiatrist who is ordered to ‘cure' Strang's obsession and who comes to reflect on what the philosopher Michel Foucault calls ‘the normalizing functions of psychoanalysis.' At stake in the film is a conflict between an authentic, world-defining passion, and the demand for tepid normalcy in everyday life.” Professor Charles Guignon, Department of Philosophy, UC Berkeley