Revolutionary Road: Critic Reviews

The best thing about Revolutionary Road... is that it doesn't end with that rote vision of bourgeois anomie. It only begins there.

Revolutionary Road, a waxworks edition of the furiously unsentimental novel by Richard Yates, tracks the unraveling of a handsome young suburban couple in the 1950s.

A deeply felt, moving and genuinely tragic study of a marriage tearing itself apart.

Sam Mendes's spiritually depleted film exerts an undeniable pull as its beautiful, doomed protagonists navigate the ennui of adult life. Revolutionary Road provides an apt bookend to a holiday season drenched in fatalistic gloom.

Winslet gives a fearless performance here. It's not her fault her husband has shrouded it in Taste.

In pieces and in spirit, the many honest parts of this drama about marital life in the 1950s are like the rooms of a house that feel right, even if the exterior slopes somewhat clumsily.

The pompous direction was inflicted by Sam Mendes, who seems to regard the 1950s as a foreign country.

Viewers in the mood for rip-snorting marital combat should go ahead and partake, but they must prepare to leave the theatre in a state of profound depression.

Like its cinematic kin, Frost/Nixon and Doubt, this, too, is a delicately crafted, prestige project whose translation to screen doesn't deliver the original's amazements.

It is honorably and brutally unnerving.

This film is so good it is devastating. A lot of people believe their parents didn't understand them. What if they didn't understand themselves?

Sam Mendes, the director of Revolutionary Road, injects a few milligrams of hope into his film version of the 1961 Richard Yates novel, an excoriating portrait of a mid-1950s marriage built on sticks, straw and delusion.

The self-dramatization is harder to capture, sometimes coming off as false moments between the actors, yet this is still a troubling story of two good people who can't live with the truth that they're as ordinary as their neighbors.

[A] devastating if flawed adaptation of the Richard Yates novel.

Revolutionary Road is easily the best-acted film of 2008, and one of the most corrosive.

Bitter, nerve-wracking, ugly and relentless, Revolutionary Road is Big Drama done right, a mesmerizing look at desperate lives, wrong moves and spoiled dreams that hits hard right from the beginning and never lets up.

Unlike the novel, which you can set aside and take a break, with the film version of Revolutionary Road, you're in for the duration, and it's ultimately too much to take.

A flawless, moment-to-moment autopsy of a marriage on the rocks and an indictment of the American Dream gone sour.

It simply doesn't play as well as it reads.

Revolutionary Road is a very good bigscreen adaptation of an outstanding American novel -- faithful, intelligent, admirably acted, superbly shot.

Somehow the film fails to inspire more than admiration, never reaching the same heights of empathy achieved by less impeccable treatments of the same topic.

If Revolutionary Road had been filmed back in 1961, when the novel came out, it would have been timely and powerful.

Sam Mendes has worked in this territory before with his Oscar-winning American Beauty. Revolutionary Road is a better movie because it doesn't rely on such blatant caricatures.

Why does the movie feel as pleasantly deadening as the midcentury Connecticut suburb where it takes place?