Proof: Critic Reviews

It's hard to quarrel with the way Proof depicts mathematical genius as an unknowable abstraction. Otherwise, we might need advanced degrees to watch it.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays the daughter of a famous dead mathematician in John Maddens terribly serious film adaptation of the much-admired Broadway play.

We are invited to believe that Hopkins, Paltrow and Gyllenhaal all have, in their various ways, alpha-brains. They look to me like they couldn't recite the three-times-table without smoke coming out of their ears.

Its themes of trust, the depth of filial responsibility and concerns about genetic inheritances are explored with depth and intelligence.

Paltrow is pretty commanding, even if Madden pushes things toward airlessness by keeping the camera so tight. The anguish on that lovely, haggard face -- you're right there with her, yearning for the moment you both can finally breathe.

Proof that you can drain most of the juice out of a play and still have an enjoyable night at the movies.

John Madden's competent, monotonous film version, not exactly stagebound but hardly freewheeling, only underscores its mechanical nature.

Although she tends to get actressy in her work, Paltrow's Catherine is a believable portrait of loss and grief.

Few movies regard the psyche with such sober discernment.

Intelligent middlebrow entertainment with a few juicy roles to feed talented actors.

Flattened onto the screen ... everybody always seems to be saying exactly the wrong thing to poor Gwyneth, which gives her the right to be insufferable.

The trouble with Proof is that, however efficiently it completes its task, you have to ask whether the job was worth starting.

An extraordinary thriller about matters of scholarship and the heart, about the true authorship of a mathematical proof and the passions that coil around it.

The story's genial unpretentiousness has been darkened and weighed down, and what's left is less than prime.

Once you get past that golden swag and curtain of hair, Paltrow's performance is devastating, cutting to the pith and marrow of parent-child relations.

The story's emotional stakes are such a grab bag that it's difficult to feel much urgency about the outcome.

Crackling good work, emotionally and intellectually interesting and grandly entertaining, saved from pomposity a good deal of the time by its sense of humor.

Madden does a competent job transferring the film from stage to screen.

The delights are in the details, and in the way the convoluted story unfolds by bits and pieces.

An elegant, intelligent drama of a breed increasingly rare in mainstream American movies.

PROOF will put a lot of viewers right back where they left off in 12th-grade calculus: asleep.

The emotional heft of Proof is considerable, even with some problems inadequately worked out.

The result, like so many stout travellers from stage to screen, is respectable. Stolidly, bloodlessly, yawningly respectable.

Those who didn't see the theatrical production (myself among them) might be left wondering if the material looked this phony on stage.

Proof is a stirring motion picture that challenges our views on a great many things about life, some of which we take for granted.