• Starring: Danny Huston, Rachel Weisz, Ralph Fiennes
  • Summary: Adapted from the novel by John le Carre, this is a gripping romantic thriller that sweeps audiences along one man's emotional and global journey to uncover the truth behind a personal loss and a worldwide conspiracy. (Focus Features)
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 37 out of 39
  2. Negative: 0 out of 39
  1. 100
    A sweaty, vital masterpiece that's always one step ahead of its audience.
  2. Simply the best adaptation of any John le Carré thriller to make it to the screen.
  3. Most of The Constant Gardener is made with good taste and with respect for its African subjects. But when Fiennes flees a Kenyan village as bandits begin their merciless attack, it's hard not to feel a little uneasy with the medium. We're meant to get a thrill out of the chase, but it's not thrilling. Sickening's more like it.

See all 39 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 86 out of 137
  2. Negative: 35 out of 137
  1. JoeC.
    10
    Great movie. Works as a thriller, romance and drama. Great performances by Fiennes and Weisz and Meirelles is proving himself as a master of filmmaking! Expand
    • 0 of 0 users said yes
  2. DavidH.
    5
    Le Carre's most disappointing book turned into a disappointing film. Odd collection of villains, some nice scenery, and a couple of pretty actors brooding. Expand
    • 0 of 0 users said yes
  3. Riren
    3
    International pharmaceutical companies have been exploiting poor Africans in need of medicine for decades in order to test their drugs, regardless of their potentially crippling or lethal side effects. If the preceding sentence interested you, read a book about it. Don't see this movie. It's neither informative, nor an actually good film. The first half hour is a nearly incomprehensible exercise in flashbacks and flash forwards, setting up a disconnected chronology to excuse all the later scenes in the film from having to occur along a realistic timeline. It works with the naivety of an action movie, but reaches insultingly for the depths of a conspiracy movie, and comes away with the satisfaction of neither. It decomposes into sentimental trash by the end, with its great cast’s highly sympathetic acting jobs being thoroughly abused by sloppy editing and very poor direction. The use of manic cinematography decreases your attention span, doing no service to the plot’s slow burn – and despite it being slow, relationships between nearly all of the characters are left horribly confusing. After you realize you spent the first forty minutes of this movie just to get back to the beginning of the plot, and still have another hour and a half to go, you'll realize the half-baked melodramatic romance (which sees the main characters go from fighting at a lecture to bouncing in bed within five minutes of screen time) and bitter pseudo-realism wasn't worth the price of the ticket or DVD. Worst of all, this movie about the abuse of Africa's sick is about pretty people - the drama is foreigners running from terror, or children in peril, or the excess of the rich, with little more than ten seconds of screen time for any character who is actually stricken with T.B. or HIV. The lack of screen time for the actual suffering in the subject matter is the worst fault of a film that is pretty much exploiting that atrocity to give guilty-feeling non-Africans some catharsis. In the end, you can blame all the evils of the world on corporations and bureaucracy, but you can't blame them for this being a bad movie. Expand
    • 0 of 0 users said yes

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