The Duchess: Critic Reviews

[The filmmakers] have accomplished their goal of making the unorthodox life of the late-18th-century noblewoman Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire, relevant to a 21st-century audience of moviegoers.

The Duchess is an overstuffed, intellectually underbaked portrait of a poor little rich girl.

Dibb's movie looks good, but there is something exasperatingly bland and slow-moving at all times. Unlike the heroine, he never takes much of a risk.

It chronicles the saga of a vibrant and forward-thinking woman hampered by the constraints of a rigid society.

I'm not sure why The Duchess doesn't wholly succeed, because the pieces are all there and they're very watchable.

Princess Di deserves livelier revisionism.

It isn't just eye candy; there's an active intelligence behind this design.

It's easy to joke about Knightley's fondness for period dramas. But we shouldn't underestimate her ability to channel the historic and modern into one compelling figure -- or her grasp of the power of dress-up to free performance.

Although it skims the surface, The Duchess is an uncommonly well-crafted historical feminist tearjerker -- both anti-patriarchal and a monument to motherhood.

The Duchess is a handsome historical film, impeccably mounted, gowned, wigged and feathered.

It's disturbingly shallow, focused so tightly on one woman's feelings of repression and loneliness that it lacks any perspective on their causes.

This is scandal-mongering fun that also lays bare the deforming power of the male aristocracy.

While I much liked The Duchess, this portrait feels unfinished.

The Duchess gives us a gorgeous world, a detailed picture of a time and place that could have been painted by Constable, Gainsborough or Watteau. But you wouldn't want to live there.

Though extravagantly pretty, The Duchess still manages to be a costume drama in which the drama survives the costumes.

The Duchess is clearly Knightley's movie, ultimately rising or falling on her performance. She's up to the task, capturing both the charm and grace that made Georgiana so captivating.

It looks like outtakes from the nauseating bubble-gum fantasy Marie Antoinette.

For all its luscious period trappings and Keira Knightley's spirited take on the title role, Saul Dibb's handsome biopic reveals little about how Georgiana Spencer Cavendish became one of 18th-century London's most celebrated and influential aristocrats.

Knightley is a paper doll around whom the movie wraps hoop skirts and 21st century victimology.

Fiennes and Knightley are exceptional in their roles and Dibb proves himself ably in his first big-budget flick.

Nice try, but the contemporary parallels are just an empty echo.

Knightley is up to the task. Her Georgiana is history with a human face.

It has impeccable production values but feels like a Masterpiece Theater production of a Harlequin romance novel.

Solid but distant melodrama about the flamboyant 18th century Duchess of Devonshire.