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70Shyer and Sweet bring consistent clarity and ever-increasing depth to the playing out of Jeanne's bold scheming and single-minded resolve; a tone of brisk wit gives way effortlessly to poignancy and ultimately tragedy.
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70You may not be able to follow the overall arc of their scheming, but scene by scene they are a delightful crew, hissing away behind their cloaks and fans.
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70It's beautiful and obvious, a dubious combination that may nonetheless ensure its success.
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63The affair may have raised eyebrows all over 18th century Paris, but it's not likely to elicit more than a shrug from 21st century moviegoers.
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58The affair of the necklace itself is so complex and many-sided that it would take a Sidney Lumet to do justice to it on film.
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50The storytelling is hopelessly compromised by the movie's decision to sympathize with Jeanne. We can admire someone for daring to do the audacious, or pity someone for recklessly doing something stupid, but when a character commits an act of stupid audacity, the admiration and pity cancel each other, and we are left only with the possibility of farce.
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50Rife with wrong people in major jobs, which leads to a movie that lacks the requisite verve to make to it sparkle.
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50The movie has almost enough corny appeal to offset its lack of originality, though, and Walken is fun as Cagliostro, the court's great prognosticator and all-around weirdo.
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50This sob story is a tough sell.
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50The miscast (or misdirected) Hilary Swank's Jeanne takes so little pleasure in coquetry and manipulation.
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50Plays like the cinematic equivalent of a paperback bodice- ripper with embossed type.
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50Swank is painfully uncharismatic, leaving Christopher Walken, in the minor role of occultist Count Cagliostro, to decamp with any scene in which he appears. His performance may not be historically credible, but it's hugely entertaining: Would that the same were true of the film overall.
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50Slipshod rather than sly. There's no fury to the movie, repressed or otherwise, which may be why when the Revolution arrives, it has all the impact of a guillotine with a deadly dull blade.
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50The best thing I can say about it is that the costumes and the hambone acting keep it from being a deadly bore.
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50Jeanne is no fun at all. This is no fault of Swank, who's caught in the overall confusion of a movie crippled by its ambitions to be both caper and heartfelt melodrama, to say nothing of a cautionary tale about the politics of celebrity in our own culture.
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50Nobody seems to know quite what he's doing in this opulent but fairly empty period fashion show, apart from campy overactors like Christopher Walken and Jonathan Pryce who appear eager to fill the voids left by their colleagues.
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40The necklace in this movie was crafted by the elite London jewelers Asprey and Gerrard -- out of cubic-zirconium stones. That's just about perfect. The Affair of the Necklace is a cubic-zirconium epic.
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40Drags and meanders when it wants clarity and clockwork, and bogs down in hazy, vague emotions.
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38Larceny at its most labored.
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30L'affaire du collier was a convoluted palace intrigue that Shyer and screenwriter John Sweet don't bother to unpack, crafting instead an endless illustrated Harlequin paperback of mawkish backstory and corset-popping purple prose.
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25It's hard to imagine how Shyer and script writer John Sweet could have brought this tale to the screen in a cruder, cornier or less interesting way.
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20A staggeringly misguided stab at making the past come alive by people who have absolutely no feel for period filmmaking. Banal at best and laughable at worst.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 3 out of 5
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Mixed: 1 out of 5
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Negative: 1 out of 5
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MishaL.2
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CharlesT.9Miscast but still entertaining, Shyer's best film.