Levity: Critic Reviews

Mr. Thornton's ostentatious restraint and his bottomless melancholy cry out for a mask and cape, and a few judicious special effects might have provided some relief, or at least helped the movie justify its title.

It's an intriguing movie, and Thornton's performance is both fascinating and maddening.

Ponderous and pretentious.

So solemnly paced and deliberately performed that it seems to solidify before your very eyes.

A lumbering pity party.

Real levity is barely present.

Thornton is starting to look like a one-trick pony.

This is a lovely film about redemption and guilt.

The characters in the well-meaning drama resemble symbols rather than people, while the storyline seeks mighty truths that remain evasive.

Slow and satisfying.

There is not a moment of authentic observation in the film; the director has assembled his characters out of stock melodrama.

Beautifully cast and acted, smartly written, done with excruciating care and glowing Roger Deakins cinematography, it's a film that, in some ways, suffers from its own seriousness, the very passion and guts that make it special.

In the end the film is undone by an overload of cliches, and by a gravity that never lets up.

The characters are well drawn.

An unrelentingly morose quest for redemption, one that leans too heavily on stock characters and tends to wander in odd directions.

A half-baked moral fable that suffers from insufficiencies both of narrative concreteness and religious depth.

Full of bald coincidences and vague moralizing.

A movie that confuses seriousness with weight, significance with silence and import with emptiness.

Corny in its use of symbolism and coincidence, marred by the deadpan performance of its hero, it seems more like a parody than a parable.

A thoughtful, almost poetic, piece that puts forth the argument that redemption is not easily achieved.

A high-charged emotional work, fleshed out with believable characters and a sharply observed environment.

Near torture to sit through.

There is just no sense of authenticity in the relationship of the characters to the environment in which Solomon has placed them.