“The story of Katharine Mansfield and her editor husband, John Middleton Murry, may already seem overworked in New Zealand, but this refreshing new movie sees ramifications in their story that spread beyond their particular lives into a thoughtful and dramatic examination of the myth-making process. It also shows us something unpleasantly egoistic in romantic love, which is seen--as it maybe always should be--as a male invention. Leave All Fair contrives a fiction in which Murry privately confronts and publicly evades accusations that his version of the late Katharine is not the real one; that, as her editor, lover and husband, he oppressed her, ignored her suffering, flouted her wishes, tailored her work to the market and tailored their love story to his own remote, romantic needs--then, with consummate false modesty, collected the royalty checks after her horrible death. John Gielgud adds John Middleton Murry to his already well-stocked gallery of pale, suave old gentlemen with worm-infested innards. It's one of his best performances, a full-blooded rendering of a bloodless man. Jane Birkin plays Mansfield as the gaunt and steely ghost who stalks his every move.... Birkin also plays Mansfield's bolder, less brilliant alter-ego of thirty years later....” Bill Gosden, Wellington Film Festival '85.

Selected for Cannes '85.