The Time Traveler's Wife: Critic Reviews

The Time Traveler's Wife is built as a game that the audience learns to play, and after a while, yes, we do get the hang of it.

Often ridiculous, awkward, unsatisfying and dour melodramatic adaptation.

The tasty nuggets of fun drown in all the soupy seriousness, but this time travel is sometimes an interesting ride.

The Time Traveler's Wife tries to transcend time and place, but it ultimately becomes bogged down in details.

What makes The Time Traveler's Wife work as drama, and certainly better than it might have, is an unhesitating emotional commitment on the part of the actors.

The Time Traveler's Wife is told with a tenderness that's unusual in a major motion picture but that leads mostly to dullness.

This thoroughness may impress fans of the bestseller source novel, but will disappoint anyone looking for transport from a movie -- being a time traveler's wife, it turns out, is mostly a drag.

It's hard to live in stolen moments, but trying to find a few enjoyable ones in The Time Traveler's Wife is nearly impossible.

The movie moves at such an agonizingly stately pace that by the end, side effects be damned, Henry's time-traveling gene starts to look mighty appealing.

The movie moves fast, as though to distract you from these shortcomings and the nearly total absence of logic.

I'm over the moon about this movie, which smooths out the psychological dissonances in Audrey Niffenegger's fine novel but is still an emotional workout.

If you allow yourself to think for one moment of the paradoxes, contradictions and logical difficulties involved, you will be lost. The movie supports no objective thought.

The emotions and crises feel pre-sanded, smooth to the point of blandness. The transitional disappearances are routine.

A kooky, head-spinning romantic mess.

An uninspired alternative to comic book pandemonium and solemn family dramas, a gloppy serving of late summer corn.

The fact that Bana is a bit of a cold fish and real sparks never really ignite between he and McAdams, who is 10 years his junior, doesn't help matters.

Maybe the novel by Audrey Niffenegger, which a number of people seem to have read and enjoyed, was more convincing, but the unsatisfactory, yo-yo script by Bruce Joel Rubin, makes no real effort to explore the inner emotions of the characters.

Fairly irresistible nonsense.

A Twilight Zone premise written like a Mariah Carey song, The Time Traveler's Wife is destined for a warm welcome on an obscure cable network. The Spinster Movie Station? The Lonely Hearts Channel?

An elegy to love, fate, loss and free will, The Time Traveler's Wife is to science fiction what Twilight is to vampire tales -- a femme-centric exploration of relationships wrapped in genre fiction.

If you can get past the calendar gymnastics, The Time Traveler's Wife plays as an affecting allegory of love that persists even when the lover is gone.

Succinctly establishes the world it takes place in, then lets us experience, to some extent, the feelings and emotions that would naturally occur in such a world.

Romance is robbed of its gamble, stripped of its suspense, shorn of its mystery, and deprived of an ending that feels earned.

There's not much [McAdams] or Bana can do to rescue this dreary piece of romantic hooey.

Long spans of time pass between lines of dialogue, many of which seem to have been inexpertly translated from a foreign language so that they almost make sense but not quite.