Blindness: Critic Reviews

As the players enact the fall and rebirth of civilization, Meirelles suggests that even a society gone to hell looks better with a little music-video-like pizzazz.

Blindness is not a great film. But it is, nonetheless, full of examples of what good filmmaking looks like.

Meirelles, along with screenwriter Don McKellar and cinematographer Cesar Charlone, have created an elegant, gripping and visually outstanding film.

The film is an often thought-provoking metaphor. But as a thriller, it becomes dreary.

It's a beautiful car that never quite cranks up. The book is deep allegory, lost in time and place, describing a suffocating little world. It's hard to get at that in cinematic form.

A perversely enjoyable, occasionally harrowing adaptation of Jose Saramago's 1995 disaster allegory.

Fernando Meirelles' awkward, repulsive yet richly imagined film uses sightlessness as a trigger for the breakdown of society.

Blindness leaves indelible images and unnerving feelings about physical and social disintegration. It is not easy to stomach.

Blindness feels at once honorably serious and way too pleased with its own soothsaying. You stagger from the dimness of the cinema, beaten down and longing for the light.

It is an allegory about a group of people who survive under great stress, but frankly I would rather have seen them perish than sit through the final three-quarters of the film.

The figures in Blindness have no names; that's how deep into the Valley of Allegory we are.

I have to admire a mainstream movie that's so overwhelmingly bleak, but that's the only real distinction of this dystopian sci-fi drama.

Murky and grainy, and showing human beings at their grimmest -- thievery, rape, betrayal, murder -- Blindness is no barrel of laughs. But it is a barrel of pretentious metaphorical musings.

Blindness is an apocalypse movie for sophisticates; it'll work for you if you're more comfortable name-checking Camus' The Plague than 28 Days Later.

Doesn't show us anything we haven't seen before.

In his effort to make a grand statement, Meirelles piles on the drama, as well as the affectations. The resulting effect dilutes the film's power.

The extremes are so barbaric few audiences will sit through them, and despite the allegorical intentions, the apocalyptic literary views in the Jose Saramago novel upon which it is based fail to translate coherently to the screen.

The personal and mass chaos that would result if the human race lost its sense of vision is conveyed with diminished impact and an excess of stylish tics in Blindness.

I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did. The story seems designed to apply to whatever fear is nibbling around your subconscious.

Fascinating as sci-fi, paltry as a parable, Blindness is one of the movie year's most daring failures.

This film rests uneasily between art and thriller, putting a huge burden on the actors, especially Julianne Moore, to convey the larger meaning of the story.

If you've read Lord of the Flies or Animal Farm, you'll know how things progress.

Earnest and dreary.

An absorbing (if admittedly flawed) thought-piece. It engaged me throughout and I found the ending to be surprisingly hopeful.

Blindness is provocative cinema. But it also is predictable cinema: It startles but does not surprise.