CNET Networks Entertainment GameSpot | GameFAQs | SportsGamer | Metacritic | MP3.com | TV.com
Home | About Metacritic | About Metascores | What's New | Wireless Versions | Discussion Forums | Advertising Inquiries | Contact Us | RSS
Metacritic.com: We Deal With Criticism
     Help
> Switch to Advanced Search  
Film Video/DVD Music Games Books TV
Printer-Friendly Version Email This Page Discuss In Our Forums

Film

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

 

Wide Releases

sort by name sort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 

Limited Releases

sort by name sort by score

97 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
83 Alexandra
43 Anamorph
35 Babysitters, The
32 Backseat
80 Band's Visit, The
62 Battle for Haditha
47 Bella
63 Blind Mountain
71 Blindsight
47 Boarding Gate
63 Body of War
58 Bra Boys
70 Caramel
54 Cashback
44 Chaos Theory
32 Chapter 27
69 Chicago 10
82 Chop Shop
46 CJ7
78 Counterfeiters, The
30 Cover
48 Dark Matter
35 Deal
61 Dhamma Brothers, The
92 Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The
73 Duchess of Langeais, The
20 Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
58 Fall, The
43 Favor, The
58 First Saturday in May, The
57 Flawless
87 Flight of the Red Balloon, The
xx From Within
44 Frontier(s)
59 Fugitive Pieces
41 Funny Games
66 George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
61 Girls Rock!
55 Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
57 Grand, The
58 Hats Off
68 Honeydripper
xx Jack and Jill vs. the World
67 Jellyfish
xx Kiss the Bride
37 Life Before Her Eyes, The
72 Life of Reilly, The
50 Look
65 Married Life
35 Meet Bill
63 Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
54 Mister Lonely
52 My Blueberry Nights
71 My Brother Is an Only Child
52 Noise
61 OSS 117: Cairo - Nest of Spies
83 Paranoid Park
55 Pathology
48 Penelope
90 Persepolis
62 Planet B-Boy
xx Plumm Summer, A
67 Praying with Lior
46 Previous Engagement, A
72 Priceless
17 Prom Night
69 Redbelt
72 Roman de gare
48 Run, Fat Boy, Run
85 Savages, The
24 Sex and Death 101
66 Shelter
75 Shotgun Stories
40 Sleepwalking
67 Snow Angels
64 Son of Rambow
71 Standard Operating Procedure
76 Stuff and Dough
64 Surfwise
xx Tashan
82 Taxi to the Dark Side
57 Teeth
56 Then She Found Me
55 Tracey Fragments, The
56 Turn the River
72 Tuya's Marriage
83 U2 3D
59 Under the Same Moon
76 Unforeseen, The
xx Unsettled
91 Up the Yangtze
55 Vice
79 Visitor, The
64 Water Lilies
45 Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
57 Without the King
74 Witnesses, The
63 XXY
67 Year My Parents Went on Vacation, The
75 Young@Heart
45 Zombie Strippers

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.



Affair of the Necklace, The
Warner Bros.

Affair of the Necklace, The reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 42 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
7.2 out of 10
based on 22 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 5 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: R for some sexuality

Starring Hilary Swank, Simon Baker, Adrien Brody, Jonathan Pryce, Joely Richardson, and Christopher Walken

A romantic drama based on the controversial true story of Jeanne De La Motte Valois, a countess whose name was stripped from her by the Royal Family during the late 18th Century. The story of her fight to restore her name and proper place in society is filled with mystery, intrigue and desire, with an infamous diamond necklace at the center of it all. (Warner Bros.)


GENRE(S): Romance  
WRITTEN BY: John Sweet  
DIRECTED BY: Charles Shyer  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: June 25, 2002 
Video: June 25, 2002 
Theatrical: November 30, 2001 
RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: USA 

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

70
Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
Shyer and Sweet bring consistent clarity and ever-increasing depth to the playing out of Jeanne's bold scheming and single-minded resolve; a tone of brisk wit gives way effortlessly to poignancy and ultimately tragedy.
Read Full Review
70
New Times (L.A.) Gregory Weinkauf
It's beautiful and obvious, a dubious combination that may nonetheless ensure its success.
Read Full Review
70
Time Richard Schickel
You may not be able to follow the overall arc of their scheming, but scene by scene they are a delightful crew, hissing away behind their cloaks and fans.
63
USA Today Claudia Puig
The affair may have raised eyebrows all over 18th century Paris, but it's not likely to elicit more than a shrug from 21st century moviegoers.
Read Full Review
58
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The affair of the necklace itself is so complex and many-sided that it would take a Sidney Lumet to do justice to it on film.
Read Full Review
50
Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
The movie has almost enough corny appeal to offset its lack of originality, though, and Walken is fun as Cagliostro, the court's great prognosticator and all-around weirdo.
Read Full Review
50
TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Swank is painfully uncharismatic, leaving Christopher Walken, in the minor role of occultist Count Cagliostro, to decamp with any scene in which he appears. His performance may not be historically credible, but it's hugely entertaining: Would that the same were true of the film overall.
Read Full Review
50
Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Nobody seems to know quite what he's doing in this opulent but fairly empty period fashion show, apart from campy overactors like Christopher Walken and Jonathan Pryce who appear eager to fill the voids left by their colleagues.
Read Full Review
50
Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
The best thing I can say about it is that the costumes and the hambone acting keep it from being a deadly bore.
Read Full Review
50
LA Weekly Ella Taylor
Jeanne is no fun at all. This is no fault of Swank, who's caught in the overall confusion of a movie crippled by its ambitions to be both caper and heartfelt melodrama, to say nothing of a cautionary tale about the politics of celebrity in our own culture.
Read Full Review
50
San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann
Plays like the cinematic equivalent of a paperback bodice- ripper with embossed type.
Read Full Review
50
Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
The miscast (or misdirected) Hilary Swank's Jeanne takes so little pleasure in coquetry and manipulation.
Read Full Review
50
Chicago Tribune John Petrakis
Rife with wrong people in major jobs, which leads to a movie that lacks the requisite verve to make to it sparkle.
Read Full Review
50
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The storytelling is hopelessly compromised by the movie's decision to sympathize with Jeanne. We can admire someone for daring to do the audacious, or pity someone for recklessly doing something stupid, but when a character commits an act of stupid audacity, the admiration and pity cancel each other, and we are left only with the possibility of farce.
Read Full Review
50
Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Slipshod rather than sly. 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.
Read Full Review
50
New York Daily News Jami Bernard
This sob story is a tough sell.
Read Full Review
40
New York Magazine Peter Rainer
The necklace in this movie was crafted by the elite London jewelers Asprey and Gerrard -- out of cubic-zirconium stones. That's just about perfect. The Affair of the Necklace is a cubic-zirconium epic.
Read Full Review
40
The New York Times Dana Stevens
Drags and meanders when it wants clarity and clockwork, and bogs down in hazy, vague emotions.
Read Full Review
38
Boston Globe Jay Carr
Larceny at its most labored.
30
Village Voice Jessica Winter
L'affaire du collier was a convoluted palace intrigue that Shyer and screenwriter John Sweet don't bother to unpack, crafting instead an endless illustrated Harlequin paperback of mawkish backstory and corset-popping purple prose.
Read Full Review
25
New York Post Jonathan Foreman
It's hard to imagine how Shyer and script writer John Sweet could have brought this tale to the screen in a cruder, cornier or less interesting way.
Read Full Review
20
Variety Todd McCarthy
A staggeringly misguided stab at making the past come alive by people who have absolutely no feel for period filmmaking. Banal at best and laughable at worst.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 7.2 (out of 10) based on 5 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Misha L. gave it a2:
One doesn't expect *much* accuracy from historical movies bearing the legend "based on a true story." This film, however, frames the characters' actions badly and goes out of its way to invent wholly fictional motivations. Joely Richardson is to be commended for having studied the actual events and to have portrayed her character true-to-life. I can't condemn Hilary Swank for accepting such a meaty role in this nonsense script, but the real Jeanne was no unfairly disenfranchised victim.

Charles T. gave it a9:
Miscast but still entertaining, Shyer's best film.

Ch'erie gave it a5:
I gave it a 5, for bringing to light how indifference and arrogance from the Royal Family ultimately led to their demise. One could feel sorry for a Queen that did little more than worry about her own affairs when the ppl of France were starving. I said could, but then I wanted to jump into the movie and smack her for being so ignorant. Joely Richardson was about the most thought provoking actress, Swank, well, lackluster at best, with such a phoney accent. Walken, he's amusing in anything, but really should be put to better use, and the overall direction, was like diving in murky water. You had to strain your eyeballs to see much of the scenes, and ears to hear the plot being unravelled, I used the captions LOL.

Nicola P. gave it a 10:
I loved the movie i would definitely watch it again.

MaĆ­ra R. gave it a 10:
Beautiful! Tha's all!

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page
Home | FILM | DVD/VIDEO | MUSIC | GAMES | BOOKS | TV | Forums | About Metacritic metacritic.com

About CNET Networks | Jobs | Advertise | Partnerships                                Visit other CNET Networks sites:

Copyright ©2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms of Use