Amelia

The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

Most of all, Earhart wanted to be able to fly free as a bird above the clouds, and director Nair and star Swank make her quest not only understandable but truly impressive.

Film Threat Matthew Sorrento

When this actor (Swank) steps into the right role, she wears and inspires it like Denzel Washington.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

A perfectly sound biopic, well directed and acted, about an admirable woman. It confirmed for me Earhart's courage -- not only in flying, but in insisting on living her life outside the conventions of her time for well-behaved females. The next generation of American women grew up in her slipstream.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Swank is no mere impersonator. Her Amelia, like Maggie in "Million Dollar Baby," is unwavering in her gaze, ambition, and drive... In Nair's evocatively art-directed (and sensationally costumed) film, Earhart comes alive.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Inside Amelia is a sharp idea struggling to get out: How does a woman marketed to the public as a star turn herself back into a human being? And at what cost?

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams

The actress and the aviatrix are a match made in heaven, but surrounding the soaring performance is a movie that's mostly earthbound.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

This movie was made to be shown to junior high history classes, not audiences in a movie theater.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

In an ironic twist, Mira Nair's big-hearted yet by-the-numbers biopic of Amelia Earhart never -- unlike the famous aviatrix -- takes chances.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Amelia goes airborne but never fully soars.

Empire Angie Errigo

Swank’s moving performance, the period dressing and beautiful planes all appeal, but dramatically it doesn’t really soar.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

A frustratingly old-school, Hollywood-style, inspirational biopic about Amelia Earhart that doesn't trust a viewer's independent assessment of the famous woman pictured on the screen.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Distressingly ordinary for such an extraordinary subject.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A lazy coffee-table book of a movie,

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Amelia is the Mack truck of flight. Heavy and lumbering, it delivers the goods, but there's not an ounce of magic in the thing.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The film's basic material, that is the history, is not without interest. And it must be admitted that every so often - for about 10 seconds every 10 minutes - we get a hint of the movie they wanted to make and hoped they were making: One about the thrill of early aviation and the promise of a young century.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Perhaps Nair believes that heroism in our tabloid era has become degraded. If so, she overcorrected. Amelia is so pure in heart that it slides right off the screen.

Slate Dana Stevens

It's enough to make you wish someone would make a movie about her.

The New Yorker David Denby

Amelia is handsome yet predictable and high-minded--not a dud, exactly, but too proper, too reserved for its swaggering subject.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

Most devastating to the film’s effectiveness is its inability to convey that one essential to the story of Amelia Earhart: the tangible pleasures of flying.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Amelia is a stunted epic, an ambitious and handsome-looking picture that tells its story in the dullest, most confusing way possible.

Time Out New York Keith Uhlich

There’s nothing more boring than a life embalmed with halfhearted Hollywood bombast, which only makes the film’s fleeting pleasures stand out all the more.

Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

So a pioneering feminist in the hands of a feminist filmmaker should have been a perfect match. But like her subject, the filmmaker gets lost in the clouds.

NPR Bob Mondello

The result is verisimilitude without engagement -- a risk-taker's story told entirely without narrative risk -- and a movie that consequently never takes flight.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

There's so much pluck and gumption on the screen you can smell it. Flesh and blood? Not so much.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

It’s all so glancing and superficial that the movie doesn’t seem to have a present tense. It goes by like coming attractions. It is, however, a treasury of bad biopic dialogue.

LA Weekly Nick Pinkerton

Drawn from two Earhart bios, Mira Nair’s dull hagiography comes in about 111 minutes too long.

Variety Justin Chang

What rankles most about Amelia is the timidity and lack of imagination with which Nair approaches one of America's most exceptional and intriguing celebrity life stories.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

With any luck this biopic of Amelia Earhart will also vanish without a trace. Hilary Swank is sorely miscast as the legendary aviator.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Sam Adams

Considering its focus on a pioneering, rule-breaking icon, the film’s utter lack of personality isn’t just a failure. It’s close to an insult.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

There’s not a real or spontaneous minute in it.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Better luck trying to find out what truly happened to the real Earhart than trying to diagnose all that's wrong with this hapless film.

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

Tis embalmed drama is a ghost from the '80s, a decade that regularly produced surprise-free, caramelized biopics. The airless Amelia is missing practically everything.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Amelia Earhart is still missing.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Alas, excesses of any pleasurable kind are absent from this exasperatingly dull production.