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Evening

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 33 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 17 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Romance
Written by:
Susan Minot (also novel)
Michael Cunningham
Directed by: Lajos Koltai
Release Date:
Theatrical: June 29, 2007
DVD: September 25, 2007
Running Time: 117 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for some thematic elements, sexual material, a brief accident scene and language
Starring Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Vanessa Redgrave, Patrick Wilson, Hugh Dancy, Natasha Richardson, Mamie Gummer, Eileen Atkins, Meryl Streep, and Glenn Close
Evening is a deeply emotional film that illuminates the timeless love which binds mother and daughter - seen through the prism of one mother’s life as it crests with optimism, navigates a turning point, and ebbs to its close. (Focus Features)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Fateless
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
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...
ReelViews James Berardinelli
The strength of the screenplay and acting provide a satisfying, although not overwhelming, two hours of romance, drama, and tragedy.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Jessica Reaves
The film, like the book, is clear-eyed without being clinical, reflective but never maudlin.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Connie Ogle
It resonates with gleaming ferocity as it unspools a story of regret, longing and resolution in two generations of women.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
The constant shifting between today and years ago is, in and of itself, powerful.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
It's like a Harlequin romance trying to pass itself off as something deeper and more profound.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Whatever Evening is saying about life, death, and guilt isn't terribly new or interesting.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
It paints its world in pastels, but the subject cries out for vivid colors.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Susan Minot’s resplendent novel of a dying woman…stumbles on its way to the screen.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Rather than concentrate on Ann's disappointed infatuation and providing a satisfactory reason for its failure, Minot and, one suspects, Cunningham in particular, chose to flesh out the character of Buddy.
Read Full Review >Variety Justin Chang
Individual moments are not without their felicitous touches -- mainly due to the cast, which is rich to the point of improbability.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Staff (not credited)
Despite the show-offy cast, it took me a while to warm to these people and their self-consciously idyllic settings--as well as to the slick direction of former cinematographer Lajos Koltai--but I was eventually won over.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
Evening is so distanced from the emotions of the story that it never breathes on its own.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
For all the creaminess of the sets and costumes, every character talks as if she is still made out of written words, not flesh, and each woman's struggles feel about as important as a tea dance.
Read Full Review >Premiere Karl Rozemeyer
A mistake was made: Evening is a book that would have been best left on the page.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Stina Chyn
Evening”has so much going for it. A great cast, amazing visuals, and solid directing throughout. So why did I leave the film saying aloud to the parking lot, "I didn't like it."
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
The characters, full of blue-blood archness and angst, are partial to self-conscious speechifying.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Evening might be the most shocking waste of natural resources since the despoiling of the Amazon rain forest.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Evening is a case study in how a subtly evocative book can elude the most well-intentioned filmmakers and some of our finest actors.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
The film is based on a novel by Susan Minot--one of those books where the author doesn't deign to put dialogue in quotation marks for fear of dispelling the dreamlike mood. It works on paper, but Minot, who shares credit for the adaptation with fellow novelist Michael Cunningham, doesn't understand that screenwriting is the art of taking away.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
This is one of the rare movies that are too sensitive for their own good.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
The performances, especially by Hugh Dancy as a sexually confused rich kid, are overwrought, and the script, which Michael Cunningham ("The Hours") wrote in collaboration with Minot, is slack.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
High-grade cheese, the sort of highly pitched melodrama that in the 1950s would have been the stuff of a lurid, lavishly staged Douglas Sirk picture.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Ella Taylor
Parked uneasily between sensitive indie and studio chick-flick, Lajos Koltai's Evening makes star-studded hash of Susan Minot's beautifully written, if emotionally constricted, novel.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
Evening feels like one of those devil's-candy productions that aim to bring artistry to a large audience, specifically a large audience of adult women who don't often go to the movies. Even considering it in that light, I found it miscalculated and overcooked.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell
The uneven filmmaking renders Minot's ideas impossibly trite.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
For all of its class-act bona fides, Evening lurches between the morose and the sentimental, with occasional incursions into the absurd.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
There are few things more depressing than a weeper that doesn't make you weep.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Schickel
Rarely have so many gifted women labored so tastefully to bring forth such a wee, lockjawed mouse.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
Doesn’t seem as if it would translate easily to the big screen. It hasn't.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
Evening proves that there are such things as mistakes, by featuring two hours of bad choices and half-executed ideas.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
Vanessa Redgrave spends Evening dying, and so does Evening.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Redgrave still manages to inspire awe, yet a poetically prosaic moment like the one in which she goes chasing after a butterfly is enough to throw a net over the whole thing.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 4.1 (out of 10) based on 17 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Dan H. gave it a10:
Great Movie, Tense exciting and romantic
France L. gave it a2:
Wrapping a film in luscious sets, peopling a film with gifted actors, decorating a film with lovely music, does not a good movie make if, at its core, it consists of poorly written dialogue, lacks any uniting tension to justify the viewer's interest, and contains too many disjointed scenes in dire need of editing.
Tony B. gave it a7:
This is a multi-textured, multi-layered film that deserves much more than it got from American audiences and critcs. Its non-linear script, superb acting and effective production design make it a winner.
Jamie B. gave it a0:
It's hard to picture in my mind that this garbage actually hit theaters. It is seriosuly the most BORING movie ever to be made.
Steve C gave it a0:
Although I have heard good things about the novel, the movie was excruciatingly bad. There isn't even the usual excuse that the author was not involved as she co-wrote the screenplay with another well-known author (and the writing was one of the worst things about the movie). Even the much-commented upon scene with Vanessa Redgrave and Meryl Streep arrives too late in this plodding picture to evoke any reaction other than "Please die soon" [addressed to Redgrave's character].
J F. gave it a0:
Halfway through the film, I had to escape, so I got up, went into the lobby and talked to the lone ticket taker about the history of the theater and life in general. Since my aged Aunt was inside … one of about 10 in a theater that could have held 400-500 … I went back. My lobby discussion was the best part of the 2 hours I spent there …. Perhaps I can make a movie based on it. My 86 year old Aunt who was looking forward to the movie said, “Why was it so long?”
Stephen S gave it a5:
Susan Minot’s Evening is an outstanding novel by an underrated writer. What’s impressive is the marriage of desperate emotion with cool technique, as dying Ann Lord drifts back to her defining youthful weekend with handsome but irresolute Harris Arden. Minot’s cascading passages cleverly match Ann’s fateful mental descents, drawing out the truth and tragedy of any life not “long enough or wide” for its owner to “know the whole of herself”. Lajos Koltai cannot translate this subtlety, and his Evening arrives as a pleasant postcard from an inconsequential director. Neither is Michael Cunningham (yep, him of The Hours, with Nicole K and her Virginia W proboscis) a sublime choice as Minot’s script collaborator. I don’t understand the gloss that is put on Harris’s rejection of Ann, nor indeed why the brilliant Minot would collaborate with pedestrians like Koltai and Cunningham. It’s only a four, but let’s give it five for Claire Dane’s vivacious turn.
