Memoirs of a Geisha: Critic Reviews

Memoirs loses its taste for risk, and settles, throughout the movie's subsequent melodramatic turns, for the familiar blandishments of good looks and technical control.

Swathed in silk and longing (mostly for a bald guy called Oscar), the big-screen version of Memoirs of a Geisha arrives with good intentions firmly in place.

With its gorgeous cinematography, costumes and production design, Geisha is a visual feast, but it lacks emotional heft and leaves the viewer strangely unsatisfied.

Memoirs of a Geisha is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot.

Its commercial compromises cripple it as a movie.

A would-be cross between Showgirls and Raise the Red Lantern, too dumb to cause offense though falling short of the oblivious abandon that could have vaulted it into high camp.

In the luxuriant Memoirs of a Geisha, three of the biggest and loveliest stars of Chinese cinema -- Ziyi Zhang, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li -- sharpen their talons.

It is a lush, blushingly romantic portrait of Asian culture as seen through a Western lens.

Memoirs of a Geisha isn't just drop-dead beautiful, it's cinematically alive with a spirited way that makes most contrivances forgivable.

... good-looking but not quite memorable ...

There is spectacle enough in Marshall's movie -- rows of geisha trainees aligned in formation like Rockettes, acres of low, cedar-and-bamboo buildings with mountains in the distance -- but nothing that comes close to lyricism.

I object to the movie not on sociological grounds but because I suspect a real geisha house floated on currents deeper and more subtle than the broad melodrama on display here.

Golden's straightforwardly involving prose, while no great shakes, has been replaced by an extremely fussy affair that is, in effect, its own silk-wrapped pictorial novelization.

Everything is beautiful -- even the squalor of poverty, the suffering of war. And nothing, ever, is revealed.

Shot for shot, Memoirs of a Geisha is one of the most beautiful movies in years, with due credit to Don Beebe's widescreen camera work, John Myhre's meticulous production design and Colleen Atwood's opulent costumes.

The performances are good, the visuals are lush, the span is epic, but the film simply never soars.

For a while, you're waiting for Memoirs of a Geisha to start. Then you can't wait for it to end.

The subject remained interesting enough to this provincial American to accept and ultimately enjoy the film's well-worn romanticism, even with its resignedly tired happy ending.

So much to see and hear, yet the magic of Memoirs of a Geisha is the human way it touches the heart. The cumulative effect is like being knocked unconscious by the wing of a butterfly.

Arthur Golden's international best-seller has been moved to the bigscreen with beauty and tact in Memoirs of a Geisha.

All three acts suffer from sluggish momentum and weak endings.

... a fascinating glimpse at a lost world of women with skin of porcelain and spines of steel, and the men in their thrall.

This is a movie for the ear and the eye, not the brain and the heart.

Memoirs of a Geisha is one long oxymoronic exercise in attempting to show delicacy through overkill.