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100The stop-the-presses news from The House of Mirth is the number of fine performances from people you never knew had it in them.
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100Her (Anderson) performance is a study in the difference between hubris and pride, remarkable for how unshowy but profoundly devastating it is.
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100This stunning movie -- one of the very best of the year -- makes a much read American classic feel new and freshly devastating.
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100The House of Mirth is not one of those teacup and doily movies; it's harsh and disturbing. Davies does superlatively right by Wharton. There's blood on the walls.
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91Anderson, possessed of an eerily Edwardian aspect, is superb, luminous and knowing and convincingly proud and desperate as the situation requires.
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90Anderson's Lily is the kind of heroine who earns our protectiveness by never begging for it; it's an astonishing performance.
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90Has a marvelous, pent-up passion.
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90Leisurely yet streamlined film, brilliantly adapted by British filmmaker Terence Davies from Edith Wharton's most powerful novel.
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90Davies has nailed Wharton's bitter satire of the flights and follies of New York society in the Gilded Age, and leading lady Gillian Anderson shows dazzling range in her portrayal of the book's doomed heroine.
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90Above all else expresses the timeless impact of Lily Bart's plight.
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90Although the cast is uniformly strong, the real revelation here is "The X-Files' " Anderson, who plays Lily with subtle gradations of emotional depth unexpected from someone who has made a career out of deadpan.
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90The cast as a whole is astonishing--especially Gillian Anderson as Lily and Dan Aykroyd in his finest role to date.
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88The movie will seem slow to some viewers, unless they are alert to the raging emotions, the cruel unfairness and the desperation that are masked by the measured and polite words of the characters.
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88Terence Davies' deliberately paced, earnest adaptation of Edith Wharton's breakthrough novel quietly captures the grim complexities of New York's social world nearly a century ago.
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88There was little mirth or innocence in the world that Wharton was able to write her way out of (she was much happier living in Paris), and Davies and his leading lady lift the silks to reveal it as the minefield it was.
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80With consummate grace and exceptional style, Terence Davies transformed Edith Wharton's caustic tragedy of manners into a somber, languid dream.
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80Terence Davies's The House of Mirth is a rigorously elegant adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, and unlike in some other Davies movies, the rigor here doesn't turn into rigor mortis.... This is dourness of a degree you won't find in Wharton, but in its own shadowed terms the film is a triumph.
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80Stick with the film, accept the rules of the time and the meditative rhythm of the language that Davies has woven into his story, and you won't be disappointed. Then read the novel. It's even better.
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What the movie occasionally lacks is dramatic juice. A reader of the novel will have a greater sense of the obstacles keeping Lily and Lawrence apart than fresh viewers of the movie will.
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75Wharton's old-school compassion and Davies's taste for artfully wrought melodrama make an unusual but ultimately successful combination.
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75While House of Mirth is well done as a period piece, it has such an eerie contemporary resonance that you nearly forget about the horses and corsets and lamplight.
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75This is very much Anderson's film. The publication of the novel made Wharton's reputation. The release of The House of Mirth should do the same for Anderson.
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75Anderson brings real gravitas to the unfortunate Lily Bart, in an Oscar-caliber performance that makes one wonder what Academy voters are looking for.
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70How well you respond to this handsomely mounted, cold-blooded tragedy will depend on your feelings toward Gillian Anderson's highly theatrical lead performance.
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70Visually detailed but emotionally dry.
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67In the lead, Anderson ("The X-Files") is competent but never quite makes the character come soaring to life.
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60Almost in spite of itself, The House of Mirth is powerful, at times even moving.
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50Viewers unfamiliar with Wharton's novel may have a hard time, especially at first, deciphering all the characters since Davies presents them at a steady clip while providing little background or explanatory material.
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40I can't recall another movie that cries out so incessantly for running commentary.
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38Anderson, in her first major non-Scully film role, is lethally miscast.
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[Anonymous]10This performance should have won Gillian Anderson the Oscar. The entire movie is like watching a beautiful painting come to life.