Brideshead Revisited: Critic Reviews

Brideshead Revisited is opulent and watchable, yet except for Thompson's acting, it's missing something -- a grander, more ambivalent vision of the England it depicts dying out.

[A] lazy, complacent film, which takes the novel's name in vain.

Kingsley Amis once said his difficulty with Brideshead Revisted was not that these people were behaving badly, but boringly. On the page, that isn't true, but here on the big screen, it turns out to be an insuperable problem.

The saga ultimately lacks the emotional wallop of the TV version. But its clever writing, strong performances and sumptuous production design make for a rich experience nonetheless.

Still hard-hitting and dense, it's a film whose ideal audience consists of younger viewers who haven't seen the TV series and who therefore have nothing to compare it to.

Gauzy and unfocused. It suffers from too many rooms and not enough view.

If it's a choice between the movie's 135 minutes or the 659 minutes of the miniseries, I'd say it's no choice at all. The shorter version is the one that seems long.

What's missing from Goode's performance and from the film as whole is the layer upon layer of accumulated motive -- the gradual evolution of a man's complex desires and even-more-complicated fears.

A good, sound example of the British period drama; mid-range Merchant-Ivory, you could say.

Thompson, Goode and Atwell make for fine screen company, despite [Emma]Thompson's arguable miscasting.

The fine cast includes Emma Thompson as the siblings' gracious but domineering mother, and the location footage of the family's majestic mansion is stunning.

The film is plush and passionate and graced with elegant performances. Best is that of Emma Thompson as Brideshead's matriarch, Lady Marchmain, who resembles a cross between Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth II and Pope Benedict.

This version feels fairly condensed.

If you're in the market for a veddy British drama and miss seeing Emma Thompson in her natural environment, Brideshead Revisited is a worthwhile two-hour meditation on faith (and the lack thereof).

The film version of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited transforms one of the quintessential novels of the 20th century into one of the grandest, most enriching films of 2008.

I recommend the brilliant pessimism of this film to all my readers, who I hope will appreciate the exquisitely rendered truthfulness of the narrative.

Allowing auds sufficient retro-aristo-lifestyle sumptuousness for their dollar, yet exhibiting admirable, intelligent directorial restraint, this Brideshead is mainstream arthouse fare par excellence.

[Feels] like a lot of other costume dramas. The phrase Brideshead Regurgitated creeps into mind.

Director Julian Jarrold and writers Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies have not surpassed their predecessors, but neither have they done any lasting damage with their interpretation of the 1945 novel.

Threaded through with ambivalence about class, religion and sexuality, Brideshead Revisited is overnuanced, a world of delicate cruelty, where most of the wounds take place without breaking the skin or even a sweat.

Even clothed in linen and flannel and tweed, the absurdities of Brideshead Revisited can never be entirely hidden.

For those with an affinity for this kind of movie -- and you know whether this applies to you -- Brideshead Revisited is a worthy, although not superior, motion picture.

A handsomely appointed but oddly unaffecting adaptation.

[Director] Jarrold seems too often to consciously be making an in-quotation-marks classy picture, much like last year's Atonement, in which the costumes and setting are just so, but the human drama gets lost amid the pictorial pleasantries.