The Painted Veil: Critic Reviews

The always surprising Watts creates a woman at once contemporary and retro. And Norton, as a producer as well as star, concedes enough space for Schreiber and the effortlessly fascinating Jones to earn their own spotlights.

The third film iteration of The Painted Veil turns W. Somerset Maugham's distaff bildungsroman into a fine romance.

Combine a strong-limbed narrative about marital frustration with a painstaking account of the British imperial presence in 1920s China.

Norton and Watts are top-notch, as are Schreiber and Toby Jones.

Even amid an atmosphere of human rot, it's too elegant for its own good, a pleasing but pale Merchant-Ivory exercise that reverently strives for a kind of simple redemptive decency that Maugham found less triumphant than this movie does.

The Painted Veil lifts Maugham's story clear of its prissy, attenuated spirituality, and into genuine passion.

The Painted Veil may begin too slowly, but it also ends too soon.

In The Painted Veil, terrific actors give glum performances.

Its strength lies in its patience -- and its slow, melting sorrow that hints at atonement.

The filmmakers are mindful of the challenges inherent in filming Maugham's novel. But The Painted Veil never fully finesses the novel's 1920s attitudes toward its ethnic others.

The movie makes for a good old-fashioned wide-screen wallow.

[Director] Curran has crafted a film that accomplishes so much. It not only draws us into this personal drama between his two principal actors, but also sets it all against a vibrant background of an ancient civilization struggling to become modern.

The acting is quite splendid, especially in the vicinity of the quite splendid Watts.

Norton and Schreiber seem too American to be English colonials, but Watts navigates a challenging transformation (in a role first played by Greta Garbo in 1934), and there are sturdy performances by Anthony Wong, Toby Jones, and Diana Rigg.

The Painted Veil is rich with history and heartbreak. It's stirring stuff.

Stunning locations, a story with strong emotional, physical and spiritual conflicts, and a first-rate cast.

The film manages to be a lush period piece, a love story, an examination of culture clash and a slow revelation of character emerging from stunted emotion.

All this comes from a novel by Somerset Maugham, although the movie leaves out most of the complexities of the book to focus on the single-minded venom of the marriage.

The Painted Veil tells a mesmerizing story while honoring all of the classic traditions of superior filmmaking -- a magnificent accomplishment that will haunt you long after it ends.

Intelligent scripting, solid thesping and eye-catching location shooting aren't enough to make a compelling modern film of The Painted Veil

Despite a fierce lead performance by Naomi Watts, The Painted Veil is a quaintly bloodless, picture-postcard adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's 1925 China-set novel -- more Merchant Ivory than David Lean.

The Painted Veil recalls an earlier era of film direction, when movies moved rather than manipulated and craft superseded special effects.

The Painted Veil never really transcends a predictable, historical model of sacrifice and personal growth, and there's not enough of the latter.

Curran, his actors and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner have made an old-fashioned melodramatic epic that, as steeped as it is in the language and tradition of old movies, is never less than thrummingly alive.