Silk: Critic Reviews

What we're told in Silk is that Michael Pitt is a French 19th-century silkworm merchant in love with his wife but obsessed with a mysterious woman he glimpses on business in Japan. What we see is a mopey fellow without the energy to comb his hair

[Director] Girard confuses pretty scenery doused in ponderous music with epic visual poetry. Impenetrable musings intended to evoke ineffable romantic longing leave you scratching your head as you wait, ever more impatiently, for something to happen.

Dralon is more like it.

Silk isn't just bad. It's utterly mad.

Limp satire.

Although the period-piece film has all the trappings, from beautiful people to an obligatory sense of tragedy, it never follows through. In fact, its love story needs a shove -- it just lies there.

Silk is a languid, too languid, story of romantic regrets, mostly ours, because romance is expected to carry the film without explaining it.

Francois Girard's adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's novel is a visually arresting period piece, set in the 1860s, that addresses memory and loss.

If there were an award for the gloomiest movie of the year, Silk would win hands down.

Vacuous, arid and terminally dull.

As sensuous as its title, Silk is an exquisitely felt love story that unfolds as delicately as a blooming flower. And as slowly.

Francois Girard's Silk is not merely painterly. It might as well be a painting, for all that it eschews storytelling, forcing the viewer to scan the lush imagery in search of clues to what, if anything, might be going on.

Though elegantly staged, Silk is badly written and indifferently cast.

It's a perfect example of how awful direction and performances can ruin an adequate screenplay.

Few movies ever have gone to such a length to tell so slight -- and, worse, unengaging -- a story.

[Alfred] Molina, as Baldabiou, is the only cast member who transcends the material -- as he always does -- and his scenes are considerably more invigorated than the rest of the film.

It is worse than a straightforward bad film, it is a middling, stagnant film that could have been extraordinary.

i sta narkotika tha se riksei, i stin katatonia, an kaneis to lathos na tin pareis sta sobara os otidipote allo para eykairia eksaskisis ton kanibalistikon soy enstikton

A flat story, lean characters and a miscast lead make this a poor facsimile of period epics like Farewell My Concubine.

THE new Keira Knightley film is a visual delight. Unfortunately, the dialogue is far from delightful.

Sluggish storytelling enlivens neither Pitt's infatuation with a local concubine nor the stubbornly feudal society it's set against. Worst of all, though, you just never give a toss.

Crashing bore of a movie.

Tremulous eroticism a-go-go, but it's all completely lifeless.

A problematic period movie, Silk is anything but finely spun. Unaided by lacklusture performances from the leads, director Francois Girard seems more interested in crafting a beautiful travelogue than he does a moving melodrama.

Francois Girard's film proves a cross-cultural yawn, as if taking its cue from Pitt's blank-faced blandness and Keira Knightley's anaemic support.