The Affair Of The Necklace: Critic Reviews

There's no fury to the movie, repressed or otherwise, which may be why when the Revolution arrives, it has all the impact of a guillotine with a deadly dull blade.

The Affair of the Necklace drags and meanders when it wants clarity and clockwork, and bogs down in hazy, vague emotions.

No matter how ornate or magnificent a strand of jewels might be, it's not the most effective device to pin a story on.

The entire film seems a series of disjointed pieces, a screenful of iron filings waiting in vain for the magnet that will line them up in a unified field.

The film has a desperate, disjointed feel that suggests the filmmakers realized it wasn't working and kept trying, ineffectually, to fix it.

Hilary Swank and Simon Baker make an especially attractive couple who have several electrifying moments onscreen.

The storytelling is hopelessly compromised by the movie's decision to sympathize with Jeanne.

Shyer ... exhibits little flair for the ebb and flow of a costume caper movie.

Shyer's film denies us the double dip of vice and virtue. It's moralistic.

Hokey, embarrassing costumer.

A cheap bauble of a flick.

This is a good example of what can happen when a bunch of grownup humans who really ought to know better get funny ideas about art.

The Affair of the Necklace is no paperback romance or swashbuckler it at first appears to be, but rather the remarkable odyssey of a young woman who lived to tell her amazing story herself.

Much of the dramatic juice and intrigue have been drained out of this old-fashioned costume drama, that in the hands of director Charles Shyer and actress Hilary Swank becomes stiff, stuffy, and banal affair.

Swank's honest mistake is in trying to be worthy of a project that's beneath her.

I felt as if I was at an Yves St. Laurent fashion show and the actors were modeling the latest in 18th-century fashions.

Jeanne is no fun at all.

... takes a fascinating footnote and reduces it to a mediocre and fitfully entertaining film.

A crass, often ridiculously misguided period drama that spells everything out in nice, big block letters so even a small child could comprehend it.

The kind of movie made bearable only by uttering snide comments to a friend.

An impressive achievement on the part of the writer, John Sweet, as well as the director, Charles Shyer.

While director Charles Shyer ... may have succeeded in creating an appropriate environment for all this skulduggery, he does so at the expense of coherent storytelling and drama.

The psychology is muddled, the badinage is bad and the acting is inadequate.

It is a pleasant, but forgettable film, worth seeing for the tale itself and for Baker's and Price's performances.

Valois has the potential to be a great character -- a woman who refuses to stay in her socially prescribed feminine role, but Swank instead highlights her passive characteristics and domestic longings.