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83Meirelles adds another perspective, that the epidemic might be a good thing if, by being thrown into the darkness together, we may once again recognize the human family to which we all belong.
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78It's a rattling, heartrending performance (Moore) in, yes, a long, hard slough of a film – one that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.
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75At times almost unbearably ugly, but by the time you walk out of the theater, you know you've seen something.
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75A perversely enjoyable, occasionally harrowing adaptation of José Saramago's 1995 disaster allegory.
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75It engaged me throughout and I found the ending to be surprisingly hopeful.
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Visually nervy, beautifully acted, intense and philosophically compelling, it struggles to connect emotionally as it wrestles with the challenging source material.
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63I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did.
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63It's more like a filmed allegory.
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60Moore is always watchable, Ruffalo and Bernal get a nice rivalry going without ever establishing eye contact (as it were), and Danny Glover has some nice moments in an underdeveloped part as an older man who finds, to his benefit, that love is blind.
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60Handicapped by pretensions to making big statements, Blindness is still gripping, disturbing and intermittently powerful.
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58As the players enact the fall and rebirth of civilization, Meirelles suggests that even a society gone to hell looks better with a little music-video-like pizzazz.
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58There's a good movie here, but we get it in pieces that are sometimes hard to decipher.
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50Blindness is provocative cinema. But it also is predictable cinema: It startles but does not surprise.
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50This film is very different: chilly, methodical, a slave to 10-ton metaphor as opposed to metaphoric provocation.
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50For all its pretension and artiness, Blindness is more like M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" (which at least had the decency to be fast-paced and short), right down to its upbeat and inane conclusion.
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50Murky and grainy, and showing human beings at their grimmest - thievery, rape, betrayal, murder - Blindness is no barrel of laughs. But it IS a barrel of pretentious metaphorical musings.
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50A brilliant idea that seems to lack the vision to be great.
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50You get the film's message, that mankind does not react well when challenged by unpleasantness it can't explain away, within the first 15 minutes -- leaving more than 100 minutes to ponderously belabor the point.
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50Not a great film, mainly because it can't transcend -- and, indeed, lays bare -- the intellectual flimsiness of its source. But it is, nonetheless, full of examples of what good filmmaking looks like. For all its chin-rubbing, brow-furrowing attitudes, it does not, in the end, give you much to think about. But there is, nonetheless, a lot here to see.
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50Meirelles' slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago's prose.
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An arresting, often riveting film that is fascinating to look at but not nearly so interesting to watch.
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40An extended metaphor for the condition of man, and boy is it extended. In the course of two hours that crawl by like four and a half.
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Unflinching at best and treacly at worst, the film unveils its apocalyptic scenario with visceral intensity, but lacks the emotional sophistication to rise above schadenfreude kicks.
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40The trouble with Blindness is that it’s so preoccupied with shouldering this symbolic weight that it gradually forgets to tell a story--to keep faith with the directives of common sense.
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38Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen.
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38A feel-nothing movie – a series of disconnected, implausible incidents that end as arbitrarily as they began, in an effort to inspire emotions the picture never justifies.
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30What was presumably intended to play like a fable plays, instead, like an overly long car commercial crossed with a scare-mongering public service announcement.
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25After a powerful opening, when we see the first victim suddenly go blind while driving in traffic, the film devolves into a dystopian freak show and wastes many wonderful performers, including Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore.
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Piles on the indignities, violence and island-of-man turmoil.
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10The able cast can't swim through the muck.
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0This ends on an uplifting and philosophical note, equating moral blindness with the literal sort, which you'll probably appreciate if you haven't already slit your wrists.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 24 out of 41
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Mixed: 1 out of 41
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Negative: 16 out of 41
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carlitod10This movie rocks! A must see. Beautifully shot and executed. a flawless piece of what will one day become cult cinema.
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SaramangoWeeps2The did a great job at ruining one of the best books I've ever read.