John Simon

"....Nevertheless, for its atmospheric and incisive first half, Klute is to be commended and even, guardedly, recommended. Jane Fonda, as Bree, is as irresistible as a surfy beach in July:  her performance washes over you like a tartly cooling, drolly buffeting liquid benediction, bringing wave after wave of unpredictable, exhilarating delight. There is a perfect blend her of shrewdness, acerbity, toughness, anxiety, and vulnerability. A quintessential femininity is caught in transition between a badly dented girlishness and a nascent womanliness as innocent of its past as a butterfly of its larva. Note the play of Miss Fonda's febrile hands when she is sweating it out with her therapist; the dartings and hesitancies of her voice, with its sudden leaps and falls of temperature; the faint seismic tremors of her facial play, indicating turbulences valiantly repressed. Truly this is one of our most valuable, loveliest  young actresses--very possibly the most accomplished of them all."

John Simon, National Review?, July 12, 1971
    reprinted in Reverse Angle, p. 44-45.