Atonement: Critic Reviews

[This] movie is abundantly attractive, every scene serenely composed, and every character so fair in love and war that, when the lights come up, it's too easy to say, ''That was good and sad and romantic and classy, now what's for dinner?''

Atonement is an almost classical example of how pointless, how diminishing, the transmutation of literature into film can be.

What a clever, ambitious, compassionate picture it is; what a success for Joe Wright and for Knightley and McAvoy. It's a film which aims at big ideas, and it treats us like grownups.

The arc and resolution don't feel nearly as absorbing and devastating as McEwan's masterful novel.

In the almost spookily capable hands of 34-year-old director Joe Wright, the film version of Atonement has achieved that to which every literary adaptation should aspire.

The movie never goes as deep as the novel (no movie could), but it's a worthy approximation: a Merchant-Ivory movie that turns in on itself with a lucid and painful sigh.

Where McEwan whispers, Wright shouts.

It is an amazing story, filled with quiet moments of profundity and more surprises than you could imagine.

As good a film as one could imagine having been made from a great work of contemporary fiction.

It is mindful art doubling as unapologetic entertainment, an ode to eros and errors assembled with vision and meticulous care.

Atonement does what a tragic romance is supposed to do.

Craft is everywhere in the film, in many touches that make it elegantly forceful.

The film is absorbing and evocative.

I hardly believed a word of it.

This is one of the year's best films, a certain best picture nominee.

Now and then you find a period picture that affords this sort of rightness of scale and satisfaction.

Screenwriter Christopher Hampton and director Joe Wright have smartly dramatized the book's wartime romance and tragedy.

An impeccable craftsman in the tradition of David Lean, Wright possesses the late director's considerable gifts for drawing out his actors.

Christopher Hampton's screenplay respects the literary focus of Ian McEwan's novel without falling into the trap of becoming uncinematic.

This is a film that might have contained itself better, but it still stings with bitter truth.

Part highbrow British drawing-room drama, part gritty war film, all entertainment almost all the time, Atonement is a masterful study of both the hurtful and redemptive effects of imagination.

One of the most successful adaptations of a distinguished novel I have ever seen.

Atonement is everything a true lover of literature and movies could possibly hope for. It is unquestionably, without any reservations, my favorite film of the year.

Rarely has a book sprung so vividly to life, but also worked so enthrallingly in pure movie terms.

Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton not only blow the Merchant-Ivory dust off the British period movie, they transform Ian McEwan's interior novel into a sweeping epic that speaks to the 21st-century soul.