Edge of Love: Critic Reviews

Booze and jealousy make a toxic cocktail, one that's heavily imbibed with much self-lacerating gusto in the grim British drama The Edge of Love.

It is an exasperatingly unfocused and underpowered movie that, like Churchill's famous themeless pudding, is unsure what it is supposed to be about.

For all its vivid evocation of its characters' tomorrow-we-die bonhomie, the film finally never quite convinces viewers of its central subject: the sisterly, almost sapphic bond between Vera and Caitlin.

This may be Knightley's first truly mature performance. Too bad it arrives wrapped in doggerel.

Occasionally, Angelo Badalamenti's fine score will pleasantly remind you of Mulholland Drive. Knightley and Miller's pseudo-sapphic tub-splashing will not.

While Thomas fans will regret seeing their literary hero reduced to a generic drunk, even those awaiting the aforementioned bathtub scene will find it barely worth the effort.

A stagy, arty, and uncompelling account of the Welsh writer and his menage-y relations with his boozy Irish wife and his young Welsh girlfriend.

While the period drama has several redeeming features, tonally it's all over the map, veering between artsy stylization and hum-drum, sometimes almost twee melodrama.

The movie makes for an engaging enough period piece.

The film succeeds as a deeply involving study of men and women caught up in a whirlwind beyond their control.

The Edge of Love has, as they say, all the tools, all the elements that usually make for success. It ought to be coaxing superlatives from all and sundry, but instead it leaves a bitter, unsatisfying aftertaste that lingers in the mind.

[Knightley & Miller] frolicking on the beach ... could easily be a couple of models from a Boden fashion shoot at play.

When it's over...we have to wonder why any of it mattered in the first place.

Maybury tackles the great Dylan Thomas in The Edge of Love, a speculative investigation into a cloudy period of the poet and dramatist's personal life. [Blu-ray]

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Ah, the London Blitz. Bombs falling, buildings on fire, people dying all around. Good times, good times.

Unfortunately, like the murky visuals, the story is also muddled.

A bit too arty and concerned with quasi-historical detail to catch fire as a romance (doomed or otherwise), and too yawningly familiar in its major chord plotting to set sail as a honest character ensemble.

While all the pieces are there for an intriguing film, John Maybury's The Edge of Love never really becomes anything.

The Edge of Love is literate and often lovely to look at, but unless you're requesting an off-key bohemian rhapsody, do not go gentle into that good theater.

The Edge of Love holds a lot of promise in its first hour and never completely falls apart, but it's ultimately not the movie it might have been.

Though very uneven in style and focus . . . the fraught complications among the foursome raise universal issues of freewheeling young love and friendship during wartime.