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90Yet another Merchant Ivory triumph.
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90The team's (Merchant-Ivory) best adaptation yet of a Henry James novel.
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83It's splendid period filmmaking, grown-up and luxurious and gossipy without ever feeling fussy.
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80A meticulously mounted film that retains the author's ambiguous characterizations yet is still emotionally accessible.
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80If this handsome, faithful, intelligent screen adaptation of the novel doesn't leave you devastated, its ominous sense of a rarefied moral and aesthetic world bending before the accelerating streetcar of history will leave you with a mournful sense of loss.
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75I admired this movie. It kept me at arm's length, but that is where I am supposed to be; the characters are after all at arm's length from each other, and the tragedy of the story is implied but never spoken aloud.
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75Too staid and stolid for audiences on the hunt for easy entertainment.
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75But it is Thurman who stands out, with a marvelous, full-blooded performance, her best in some time, as tragic Charlotte.
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75If The Golden Bowl -- isn't charged with electric emotion, well, that's not what Henry James or James Ivory is about.
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75What Merchant, Ivory and Co. arrive at is a sort of handsomely illustrated Cliffs Notes version of the novel.
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70Seen in the bowl's metaphoric reflection, Nolte's Adam, with his patronizing wish to build a great art museum to "give something back" to the poor laborers who built his fortune, is a complex American monster.
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70Were the casting stronger, the film -- would have had a better chance of transcending its lack of subtlety.
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70Another handsome, dramatically moribund adaptation of a grand old classic.
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70Worth the price of admission if only to see the slinky Thurman decked out in a form-fitting, sequined pre-flapper era outfit. The word stunning hardly does her justice.
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67If it's not perfect, it still gives pleasure to the eye.
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67There's no mirth, and precious little passion, left in this house.
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63Certainly diverting and, in Thurman, it also has a knockout of a performance.
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63Nolte, at least, delivers his lines with laser accuracy, and gives The Golden Bowl the life that so much cogitation could have drained from it.
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60What makes Nolte so much stronger than the other performers is precisely this sense of mysteriousness and indirection, which doesn't really correspond to the Adam Verver of the novel but certainly jibes with James's overall method.
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60This early-1900s costume drama surely differs from Henry James's source novel.
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58The restraint so magnificently applied in "The Remains of the Day" has simply fallen into disconnection.
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50Dances in circles until you tire of admiring it.
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50Impeccably mounted, nicely scored and beautifully written.
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50The movie establishes good will (or even great will) in the initial scenes because it's so gorgeous, but the rest is such a slog.
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50Henry James' tangled, turgid prose always seems to me like a thicket of thorn trees -- so I should be grateful when somebody does the job for me on film. But I'm not - at least, in the case of The Golden Bowl.
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50What is grating is the filmmakers' perennial tendency to underestimate their audiences; their lack of faith leads them to drive home each nuance with a hammer.
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50Though it often wallows in louche baroque textures, The Golden Bowl is perhaps the most visually accomplished of the Ivory soaps.
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50A deliberately paced literary film that takes too long to build narrative momentum and explore its central dramatic conflicts.
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40Its splendor cannot be denied, but then again neither can the emptiness of this Henry James adaptation.
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25Takes a literary milestone of ambiguity and makes everything about it blisteringly obvious.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 1 out of 5
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Mixed: 1 out of 5
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Negative: 3 out of 5
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