Amelia
Metascore
37 out of 100

Generally unfavorable reviews - based on 34 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9 out of 34
  2. Mixed: 14 out of 34
  3. Negative: 11 out of 34
view
per page
  1. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Ray Bennett
    90
    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.
  2. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Matthew Sorrento
    80
    When this actor (Swank) steps into the right role, she wears and inspires it like Denzel Washington.
  3. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    75
    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.
  4. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Carrie Rickey
    75
    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.
  5. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Connie Ogle
    63
    In an ironic twist, Mira Nair's big-hearted yet by-the-numbers biopic of Amelia Earhart never -- unlike the famous aviatrix -- takes chances.
  6. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    63
    Amelia goes airborne but never fully soars.
  7. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    63
    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?
  8. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    63
    This movie was made to be shown to junior high history classes, not audiences in a movie theater.
  9. St. Louis Post-Dispatch
    Reviewed by: Joe Williams
    63
    The actress and the aviatrix are a match made in heaven, but surrounding the soaring performance is a movie that's mostly earthbound.
  10. Empire
    Reviewed by: Angie Errigo
    60
    Swank’s moving performance, the period dressing and beautiful planes all appeal, but dramatically it doesn’t really soar.
  11. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    58
    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.
  12. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Phillips
    50
    Distressingly ordinary for such an extraordinary subject.
  13. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Lou Lumenick
    50
    A lazy coffee-table book of a movie,
  14. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Mick LaSalle
    50
    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.
  15. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Rick Groen
    50
    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.
  16. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    42
    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.
  17. NPR
    Reviewed by: Bob Mondello
    40
    The result is verisimilitude without engagement -- a risk-taker's story told entirely without narrative risk -- and a movie that consequently never takes flight.
  18. Time Out New York
    Reviewed by: Keith Uhlich
    40
    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.
  19. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Kimberley Jones
    40
    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.
  20. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Stephanie Zacharek
    40
    Amelia is a stunted epic, an ambitious and handsome-looking picture that tells its story in the dullest, most confusing way possible.
  21. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Betsy Sharkey
    40
    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.
  22. Slate
    Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
    40
    It's enough to make you wish someone would make a movie about her.
  23. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: David Denby
    40
    Amelia is handsome yet predictable and high-minded--not a dud, exactly, but too proper, too reserved for its swaggering subject.
  24. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Michael O'Sullivan
    38
    There's so much pluck and gumption on the screen you can smell it. Flesh and blood? Not so much.
  25. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    30
    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.
  26. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Nick Pinkerton
    30
    Drawn from two Earhart bios, Mira Nair’s dull hagiography comes in about 111 minutes too long.
  27. Variety
    Reviewed by: Justin Chang
    30
    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.
  28. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: J.R. Jones
    30
    With any luck this biopic of Amelia Earhart will also vanish without a trace. Hilary Swank is sorely miscast as the legendary aviator.
  29. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    25
    There’s not a real or spontaneous minute in it.
  30. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    25
    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.
  31. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Sam Adams
    25
    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.
  32. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Joe Neumaier
    20
    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.
  33. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    20
    Alas, excesses of any pleasurable kind are absent from this exasperatingly dull production.
  34. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    20
    Amelia Earhart is still missing.

User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
5.6 out of 10

Mixed or average reviews- based on 26 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5 out of 7
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 7
  3. Negative: 1 out of 7
  1. bethesdabob
    10
    This movie was superb. Hillary Swank and Richard Gere are terrific. Don't miss it. You will love it; it's low key film-making at its best. Why it received such low scores is beyond me. It is a 10 in my book.… Full Review »
  2. ChadS.
    3
    Her plane is slow. Amelia Earhart's Lockheed L-10 Elektra doesn't zip in the sky like the crates flown by test pilots in other aviation-heavy films such as Tony Scott's "Top Gun" and Phillip Kaufman's "The Right Stuff". The plane's relative lack of speed doesn't translate well to the screen, but this non-dramatic handicap could easily have been counterbalanced through a clearly delineated rendering of how air travel was far from routine during this era, in which each flight came fraught with the possibility of a crash. To set the stage of Earhart's crowning achievement(her solo flight across the Atlantic), "Amelia" should show, not just tell, about the unsuccessful attempts made by other female aviators, which ended in death. There's not enough midair tension to help illustrate historicity's dual nature of Earhart's piloting career, which ideally would have displayed her heroism, in simultaniety with evidence that backed the claims of her piloting contemporaries who disputed her competence. Since Earhart's professional accomplishments come off as surprisingly dull, the aviatrix's personal life; her marriage to G.P. Putnam(Richard Gere) and affair with Gene Vidal(Ewan McGregor), comes dangerously close to defining her. The sweeping musical score sweeps all the daredevil spirit out of her. It's a soundtrack better suited for a swoony, romantic woman of her times, not an iconoclast with steely ambition. The music turns Amelia into something she probably never was: soft. Childless throughout her marriage to the famed book publisher, the film, perhaps invents a maternal side for the pilot, who is exceedingly nice and motherly to Gene's son. The music reduces this trailblazing woman, as if "Amelia" was about the first stewardess to fly across the Atlantic.… Full Review »
  3. WinstonLin
    10
    Despite the reviews, Hilary Swank is STILL on my Oscar-watch.
See all user reviews »