Amelia: Critic Reviews

Apart from the costume design, Amelia does not deserve any award buzz at all.

Amelia is a frustratingly old-school, Hollywood-style, inspirational biopic about Amelia Earhart that doesn't trust a viewer's independent assessment of the famous woman pictured on the screen.

Alas, excesses of any pleasurable kind are absent from this exasperatingly dull production.

A tinny and barnacled affair, showcasing a peculiarly awful performance from Hilary Swank.

Amelia goes airborne but never fully soars. It's hampered by a too-reverential portrait of the record-breaking aviator.

Look, nobody's asking for a miniseries here, but at times the movie feels more like a History Channel documentary -- respectful to the point of reverential -- than a rip-snorting yarn.

his embalmed drama is a ghost from the '80s, a decade that regularly produced surprise-free, caramelized biopics. The airless Amelia is missing practically everything.

Amelia leaves you wondering how its abundantly gifted director, Mira Nair, and its Oscar-winning star, Hilary Swank, could have been complicit in such clumsiness.

Amelia is not very good, and not very good in ways that collect and showcase all the familiar failings of the classic biopic.

The movie is as conventional a biopic as Earhart was an unconventional woman.

It's all so glancing and superficial that the movie doesn't seem to have a present tense. It goes by like coming attractions. It is, however, a treasury of bad biopic dialogue.

Amelia is handsome yet predictable and high-minded -- not a dud, exactly, but too proper, too reserved for its swaggering subject.

Amelia is a perfectly sound biopic, well directed and acted, about an admirable woman.

A director can do only so much with a script...that feels like it's on the runway, waiting, even when it's up in the air.

With any luck this biopic of Amelia Earhart will also vanish without a trace.

Though this traditional story about a defiantly nontraditional woman doesn't always soar, it fits Hilary Swank, its producer/star, like a jumpsuit. She and Nair thrill to the life of this American who broke records, hearts, and boundaries.

It has beautiful cinematography, a star performance that is shocking in its authenticity, a careful eye for nuance and detail and an irresistible blend of action and romance that should spell automatic success.

To say that Amelia never gets off the ground would be an understatement; it barely makes it out of the hangar.

The film discreetly tiptoes around rumors of Earhart's reputed bisexuality ("Maybe at one time," she says) and her relationship with aviation pioneer Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor impersonating a department-store dummy).

Amelia earns a pass, corny as it sometimes is. The lady earned her wings, and Swank, especially, more than does right by both the woman and the legend.

Courting Oscar with unseemly lust, while also promoting Earhart as an early feminist, the film strives too hard to be profound and not enough to be merely human.

Seldom has a bio's style clashed so deafeningly with its content.

Directed by Mira Nair and executive-produced by its star Hilary Swank, the movie seems oddly preoccupied with the audience's approval for its subject.

A by-the-book bio-pic.