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100A quiet movie, shaken from time to time by ripples of emotional turbulence far beneath the surface.
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100What distinguishes Girl With a Pearl Earring is its combination of refined filmmaking and Johansson's exquisitely understated acting. It partakes of Vermeer's spirit and style, and that makes it one of the year's best movies.
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100A rich gem expertly told in a surprisingly scant 95 minutes.
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100Look closely at Johansson...an immaculate period performance. [15 December 2003, p. 119]
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90This is an art film in spades.
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90An intelligent, visually ravishing adaptation of Tracy Chevalier's best-selling novel.
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90If the scope of the film feels small, Girl With a Pearl Earring fills that scope to bursting with subtle glory. It takes things as far as they can -- and should -- go.
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83The actress (Scarlett Johansson) gives a nearly silent performance, yet the interplay on her face of fear, ignorance, curiosity, and sex is intensely dramatic.
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83Johansson, fittingly, is the focus. In her face, as in the faces of Vermeer's handful of captivating subjects, the viewer intuits whole stories and worlds.
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80one of the rare book adaptations that actually benefits from a visual makeover.
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80Webber spins a slight but considerably enchanting tale of impossible romance and artistic discovery.
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80Webber displays a great sense of understatement and a keen eye for careful framing, with cinematographer Eduardo Serra beautifully re-creating Vermeer's signature play of shadow and light.
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80Even if Girl With a Pearl Earring is not nearly as remarkable dramatically as it is visually, it is, finally, a film of great beauty, and that is something worth appreciating.
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80The most enchanting point about cinematographer Eduardo Serra work here is that he hasn't put Vermeer's painting into the film; he has put the film into Vermeer.
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75Near the end, when Griet puts on that earring and Johansson magically morphs into the figure on that canvas, you'll be knocked for a loop.
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75Does an uncommonly good job of summoning all that goes into a masterpiece - erotic tension, financial considerations, even the sensual, elaborate grinding and mixing of paint colors as per 17th-century requirements.
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Provocative.
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75Dancing on the edge of dullness, ''Girl'' is continually saved by the look of things: the hush of an atelier in midafternoon, dust-motes swirling in a sunbeam, pigment blooming under mortar and pestle. Impatience is forestalled, time and again, by rapture.
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75One of those films that does many things right, and that places it among the year's best period pieces. It's a cut above the usual BBC costume drama.
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75The film is well-paced and surprisingly suspenseful.
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75It isn't an exciting work of art so much as a contemplative reverie on the nature of art -- and what's wrong with a smart essay that unfolds like a sweet dream?
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75If movies were still silent, Girl With a Pearl Earring would be a near-masterpiece.
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75There are certain rare movies that speak to us solely through the power and initiative of their visuals. This is one of them, and if you're receptive to this kind of movie, and know Vermeer's work, it's an unusually satisfying, even enriching experience.
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70Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and silently beseeching, she's (Johansson) even more a screen for projection here than in "Lost in Translation"; surrounded by a gaggle of over-actors, she glows with understatement.
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70It's beautiful to look at, and yet the story is strangely lacking; the novel's first chapter, available online at author Chevalier's Web site, tchevalier.com, seems to contain more plot points than the entire film.
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70The period detail is more vibrant than the minimal story.
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63Laughably predictable in its plotting, crude in its symbolism, ploddingly paced and often rendered almost comical by the heavy-breathing overacting of Johansson's supporting cast.
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63Girl With a Pearl Earring is really about watching paint dry. S l o w l y.
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60Webber's assured directing is evident throughout; in addition to eliciting strong performances from his cast, he always knows when to linger on an image and when to move on.
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60What's the point of setting up a historical fantasia around an invented character if you're only going to make her part of the scenery?
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60Pretty much the whole movie is a series of poses, static and uninvolving, except for cinematographer Eduardo Serra’s lighting, which makes everything look convincingly Vermeer-ish. I’d like to see what he could do with Rembrandt.
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60An auspicious feature-directing debut by Mr. Webber in so many ways -- a groaning board of temptations for the eye and ear -- that you may almost forgive the film its lack of drama and the perfunctory attempts at characterization. Viewing this film has been likened to watching paint dry; actually it is more like watching a painting dry.
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60This material is either underdeveloped or crudely put by a director whose style is so conventional that he makes James Ivory look, by comparison, like Jean-Luc Godard.
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60Eye caviar that doesn't pretend to be much else.
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60Unfolds as a series of meticulous tableaux vivants, but like those parlor pastimes, it lacks physical verve and a compelling emotional charge.
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50Webber's film offers painstaking reproductions of the town of Delft circa 1665 in all four seasons. That's just the problem: you feel every pain he took. Girl With a Pearl Earring is an art movie in the worst way.
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50In filming this movie with such artistic precision, the movie ironically winds up objectifying Griet just as much as any appreciator of the original painting.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 18 out of 27
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Mixed: 5 out of 27
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Negative: 4 out of 27
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MarcusB.10