Enduring Love: Critic Reviews

Michell's achievement is all the greater in modulating the coiled reposes of his superb male leads.

Rhys Ifans plays the part of the scorned lover with neurasthenic delicacy and a spidery creepiness in this serious movie about the petty cruelties of love.

It's the best kind of movie: so alive in its storytelling that only in retrospect do you realize that the ideas represent a metaphysical inquiry.

It flutters around fitfully, still filled with air, then falls in a deflated heap in the corner.

It walks the line between romantic piety and utter tastelessness, opting to be a cheap potboiler only after it's run out of ways to seem profound.

Razor-walking self-consciousness (or just plain braininess) is perhaps impossible to depict coherently on-screen, and the someone's-watching-me vibe is otherwise overfamiliar to moviegoers.

Movie love is usually so idealized it ennobles behavior that ordinarily would be considered stalking. Enduring Love deliberately smudges the line between what is bizarre and what is simply human nature.

Does a fine job of slowly racheting up the psychological tension.

Enduring Love is better in parts than as a whole. Ultimately, the film has too many jagged edges.

Tells us that the balloons to avoid are the ones that don't know whether to float or stick to the ground. The same goes for movies.

Most movies remain at the top level of action: They are about what happens. A few consider the meaning of what happened, and even fewer deal with the fact that we have a choice, some of the time, about what happens and what we do about it.

Slowly, inexorably, it ties you in knots.

Filmmaker Roger Michell doesn't so much adapt Ian McEwan's fine novel Enduring Love, a surgically precise anatomy of romance and obsession, as eviscerate it and wave its entrails before the audience.

This drama about love, catastrophe and obsession raises a lot of questions but leaves it to viewers to provide most of the answers.

It's heady stuff, though stretched too far for convenience.

Full of hot air.

A riveting, revealing and powerful film about the surprising shades and evolving emotions of love.

Story of an insidious stalker disrupting the lives of an intellectual London couple is handled in a bracing and distinctive manner.

Enduring Love contains impeccable performances, especially by the frightening Ifans.

It's a genuinely intriguing thriller and a mystery with a most rewarding conclusion.

With a power that resonates, Enduring Love captures that sense of lives blown apart by a sudden gust.

Well-meaning, yet listless.

It's affirmative action for psychos.

This slender, increasingly monotonous stalker plot feels ludicrously overintellectualized -- full of hot air. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a balloon is just a balloon.

Craig, in his meatiest film role to date, delivers his usual incisive performance, even if this intimate drama of contemporary Londoners pushes the boundaries of credibility.