The Architect: Critic Reviews

Every character in The Architect is crazily stuccoed with crisis.

... much of what's on the screen feels like a creaky, tone-deaf classroom exercise in mechanical contrivance.

The Architect is an affecting study in the private loneliness and strength of Tonya, a woman who understands her own motives only imperfectly but presses ahead anyway.

There are too many characters undergoing life changes in the story for each to be properly developed in an 82-minute movie.

Too many "big" moments are happening to too many people for the movie to feel plausible, and Tauber tries to tie many of those plots together in a way that seems contrived.

Given the fact that The Architect is obviously a work in the tradition of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, not to mention Henrik Ibsen, it's disappointing.

Occasionally a pallid film is salvaged by one wonderful performance. To the extent The Architect will be remembered, it will be for giving a starring role to the exceptional Viola Davis.

Stage-to-screen transition stumbles, however, when the concept of 'home' no longer provides an evocative offstage metaphor but, instead, becomes a thudding on-screen presence.

The dull indie drama The Architect comes from the stage, which is where it should have stayed.

It's a compact and symmetrical picture with all its plot points in the right places, but I never found it convincing in the slightest.

...A grim little exercise in exorcising middle-class guilt.

It is frustrating to watch the film blow some respectable capital on indulgence in narrative frippery.

In my opinion, the film tries to cover too much ground. The plot strands don't exactly coalesce into a tight story. Perhaps that was [the director's] intent, but for me something was missing. The cast does yeoman work but I somehow couldn't exactly get ca

When Tauber finds his focus, The Architect is worth watching. But Tauber rarely finds his focus.

It would bear mentioning that nothing winds up being resolved in the film, if it weren't for the fact that there's nothing to resolve.

What makes the movie satisfying is the fact that its ethnic tensions are never overtly exacerbated, but rather subtly illustrated simply by the comparison of the decadent malaise of the spoiled-rotten versus the neverending nightmare of the have-nots.

Despite his obvious earnestness, first-time director and cowriter Matt Tauber is ill equipped to mine emotions this complex.

The movie doesn't so much tell a story as scream its messages at us in a series of awkward scenes that test the actors' ability to make fake-o dialogue seem like something an actual person might say.

I am sick to death of taking the White Guilt Trip.

Despite graphic scenes of drug- and crime-infested buildings where people are forced to live behind bars like prisoners, The Architect still feels stagebound, inert when it needs to be cinematic.

Painfully portentous and more solemn than Santa's funeral, The Architect gets this year's prize for the movie most likely to spoil holiday cheer.