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Memoirs of a Geisha
Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Entertainment


6.5

based on 38 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 109 votes
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FILM:

Chicago

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for mature subject matter and some sexual content

Starring Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, Kôji Yakusho, Kaori Momoi, Youki Kudoh, Li Gong, and Kenneth Tsang

Set in a mysterious and exotic world which still casts a potent spell today, the story begins in the years before World War II, when a Japanese child is torn from her penniless family to work as a servant in a geisha house. Despite a treacherous rival who nearly breaks her spirit, the girl blossoms into the legendary geisha Saguri. Beautiful and accomplished, Saguri captivates the most powerful men of her day, but is haunted by her secret love for the one man beyond her reach. (Sony Pictures)

GENRE(S):	Drama \| Romance
WRITTEN BY:	Robin Swicord Doug Wright Arthur Golden (novel)
DIRECTED BY:	Rob Marshall
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: March 28, 2006 Theatrical: December 9, 2005
RUNNING TIME:	144 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

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...

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The story is so compelling and the movie is such a pleasure to the eyes and ears.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Here is a film about Japan made by Americans, shot mostly in the U.S. and, of course, in English. Once you accept these compromises in the name of international filmmaking, none is a real deterrent to enjoying this lush period film.

Variety Todd McCarthy

From a filmmaking point of view, this is a work that the old Hollywood moguls themselves would have been proud to present.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

There's no doubting that Memoirs of a Geisha is a lush motion picture, and it has much to recommend it, but this will not go down as one of the great screen romances of the 2000s.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

The movie may be set in prewar Japan, but it's pure 1940s Hollywood. There's costume, pageantry, melodrama, the feeling of a sweeping epic without the bother of too much accuracy, equal doses of heartbreak and uplift.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Any doubts about three Chinese actresses speaking English with Japanese accents vanish in the face of their deeply felt performances and the world Marshall conjures with magical finesse.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Don't be misled by the chopsticks and cherry blossoms: Memoirs of a Geisha, for all its exotic casting and locale, is our friend "Cinderella" in a kimono.

Premiere Peter Debruge

Marshall's Memoirs achieves something few other high-profile literary adaptations do: Rather than simply inspiring us to hunt down the source material, it actually stands alone as a film, rich in drama and star-crossed romance.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

Spanning two decades and a momentous war, Memoirs of a Geisha displays all the pomp and grandeur of an epic, but you wouldn't call it sweeping.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

It's not a great movie, or even a particularly good one, but it's spectacular. No expense has been spared. The technical crew reads like a roll call of Oscar-night regulars.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Indeed, the film is altogether too much like Sayuri: trying to overwhelm with surface beauty and unspoken emotion, it never hits deeper than the skin.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The film version of Memoirs of a Geisha is very like a geisha itself: a thing of exquisitely refined surfaces beneath which beats an ordinary heart.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

I object to the movie not on sociological grounds but because I suspect a real geisha house floated on currents deeper and more subtle than the broad melodrama on display here.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Memoirs of a Geisha is like a sumptuous piece of silk: stunning yet ultimately flimsy. You wish it were more like a kimono, richly woven, multilayered and more substantial.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Simultaneously gorgeous and forgettable, sentimental and prurient.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

Full of falling rain, fluttering silk, John Williams's music and whispery voiceover, Memoirs of a Geisha is one long oxymoronic exercise in attempting to show delicacy through overkill.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

The film comes to life whenever the cartoonishly vindictive Gong throws a tantrum, but she played virtually the same role in Zhang Yimou's "Shanghai Triad," which presented a far more compelling rationale for her star fits. Without her, this expensive piece of backlot pageantry turns vivid history into an ossified tchotchke.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Memoirs of a Geisha is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot.

Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

The international Asian stars gamely tackle their English-language roles, aided by superior costumes, makeup, and set design. But despite all the hothouse intrigue, the film lacks passion.

Empire Angie Errigo

A beautiful, exotic and well-acted cultural hybrid, but it’s never as moving as it ought to be.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Memoirs of a Geisha was never primed to be a film that burns down the house.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Not since "Snow Falling on Cedars" have I seen so pedigreed a lit-pic sit there like such an inert teapot, available only to be admired for its mysterious, ineffable Asian teapotness.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Beautiful geishas flit and whoosh through the equally beautiful scenery. Their kimonos are artworks-in-motion. So why is the film so boring? It could be because director Rob Marshall is so transfixed by all the ritualistic hoo-ha that he never brings the story down to earth.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Mr. Marshall can't rescue the film from its embarrassing screenplay or its awkward Chinese-Japanese-Hollywood culture klatch, but Memoirs of a Geisha is one of those bad Hollywood films that by virtue of their production values nonetheless afford a few dividends, in this case, fabulous clothes and three eminently watchable female leads.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

There's no life, no juice, in the picture. Instead of tempting you into submission, it merely drugs you. It's surprising that a filmmaker who gave us such a lively debut, "Chicago," could slap us with a picture as dull and worthy as this one.

New York Post Kyle Smith

It's based on a novel, but you'd guess it came from a coffee-table book. Marvelous design, photography and costuming mark this period piece.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Too labored and cliched to incite passion in an audience.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Oh, what awful voices -- clumsy words as well as cheesy accents -- come out of the actors' mouths! Though I wanted to appreciate the human story, and the lavish spectacle, I couldn't get past the clangorous echoes of Charlie Chan.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A lush, lovely snooze-fest.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

Well, we're not in "Chicago" anymore, or even its soundstage approximation, but that hasn't stopped Oscar-nominated director Rob Marshall from fashioning another epic spectacle out of two squabbling women in (a sort-of) show business.

Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson

Director Rob Marshall, as he did in "Chicago," plays the movie as though it's all an embellished memory inside the head of geisha Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang), but why would she remember everyone speaking in choppy English?

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Colleen Atwood's costumes are the best a film adaptation of a popular book can buy. They rustle like nobody's business. The film itself is equal parts silk and polyester.

The New Yorker David Denby

Somehow the movie that Rob Marshall has made from Golden's novel is a snooze. How did he and the screenwriter, Robin Swicord, let their subject get away from them?

Newsweek Staff (Not credited)

Trying too hard to grab our attention, he (Marshall) loses it. The art of the geisha prizes subtlety, stillness, grace. Why doesn't this movie?

Slate David Edelstein

It skips lightly over the surface of its rich material, more preoccupied with making pretty pictures than dipping below the surface so that you can experience the world through the eyes of its traumatized, yet increasingly savvy, heroine.

Village Voice Dennis Lim

Swaddled in the posh vulgarity that passes for awards-season elegance, Memoirs is deluxe orientalist kitsch, a would-be cross between "Showgirls" and "Raise the Red Lantern," too dumb to cause offense though falling short of the oblivious abandon that could have vaulted it into high camp.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It is a grand-looking, grandly empty pageant.

Film Threat Phil Hall

To its credit, the film's costume design is stunning. But unless you have a kimono fetish, there's no reason to pay a good dollar (or a yen, for that matter) on this junk.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.5 (out of 10) based on 109 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Angie F. gave it a10:
this is an amazing film that protrays Japan in a terrible time period of war with such beauty and grace. i love this movie.

Dude gave it a10:
GREAT MOVIE! I love it. Obviously, Japanese actresses aren't "ALL" that. And the history of geisha in Japan isn't all that glamorous anyways, so does it matter if the movie use Japanese actresses? Asians are asians. So for a movie on Eiffel Towel that's to be played in English, do all the actors/actresses need to be French? It doesn't matter, as long as they look Caucasian. Same for this Memoir of Geisha movie, as long as the actresses/actors are Asian, that's all that mattered.

Rashko T. gave it a10:
A pure and spectacular masterpiece with great,exciting storyline backed up by a brilliant John Williams's soundtrack!What can we ask more?

Tyrone Movieman gave it a3:
The film is well acted, over-dramatic, and is a visual masterpiece. But the Hollywood soap opera based on a Japanese story overrun with a badly spoken English screenplay using Chinese actors is unavoidably silly. The film disserves to be honored for its superb visual costumes, make-up and design, but unfortunately that is it.

Sam S. gave it a7:
The first 45 minutes were awful despite some very beautiful scenes. they were in the perspective of a terrible 8 year old Chinese actress and consisted of repetitive escapes and over-dramatic soundtrack filled with slow-moving bordom and confused exploitation of great cinematography. That is a run-on sentence that summarizes how I felt about the start of first 45 minutes of the film. However after that it moved into the life of the older woman. and that is a beatiful, much faster, and exrodinary story that i like alot but it has its flaws. The acting is much better for the remaining 1 hour and 45 minutes (the film is 2.5 hours) and the story is very moving and amazing at times. The movie is the most beautiful movie i have ever seen. but it is not one of the best. its a Chinese "big fish" that is way too drawn out yet at times superb. It earns its appearance nominees at the oscars. 3.3 stars.

Beth M. gave it a10:
I thought that the film was fantastic! All those people who don't are worthless and pathetic they obviously didn't see the beauty and magnificence in the movie! Everything about it was amazing and so what if it was in english so what if the leading role actress was Chinease! It was and will always be a brilliant film that will stun everyone into awe!

Edwin K. gave it an8:
Pretty good movie, at times impressive cinematography (opening scene), a very promising young "lead" actress, a movie I would be glad to see again.

Memoirs of a Geisha Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Entertainment

Memoirs of a Geisha
Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Entertainment