Metacritic reviews

This is the best of all the Tracy-Hepburn comedies--and one whose unabashedly feminist screenplay seems more incisive with each passing year. [10 Mar 2006, p.C7]

Despite Cukor’s rocky start with the couple, Hepburn and Tracy are in top form in Cukor’s sophomore collaboration, the 1949 courtroom comedy Adam’s Rib.

The film is a classic, and deservedly so: the conjunction of Tracy's sly listlessness and Hepburn's stridency defines "chemistry" in the movies.

The on-screen chemistry between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy was so powerful that they ended up making nine movies together, to huge public acclaim. But in no other film did that chemistry produce such delightfully explosive results as Adam's Rib.

In a film in which everybody is acting - a point neatly stressed by the stylised staginess of Cukor's direction - the performances (not least from Wayne and Hagen) are matchless.

George Cukor employs an unusually large number of long takes, often allowing the inspired spats between his leads to play out in unbroken real time. But the much more likely explanation for the film’s enduring popularity has to be the way it took the gender politics underlying many of the duo’s collaborations and made them the full-fledged focus.

Adam's Rib is a bright comedy success, belting over a succession of sophisticated laughs. Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin have fashioned their amusing screenplay around the age-old battle of the sexes.

Of Adam's Rib we might say, in short, that it isn't solid food but it certainly is meaty and juicy and comically nourishing.

Delightful, sophisticated comedy sparked by the famous chemistry between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

Cukor's work is too arch, too consciously, commercially clever, but it's also spirited, confident.