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88This one-of-a-kind spellbinder from first-time director Laurence Dunmore is not afraid to shock. Depp is a raunchy wonder, especially in a time-capsule-worthy opening monologue.
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80As the imperious actress (and whore) Elizabeth Barry, the unlikely object of Wilmot's affection, Samantha Morton finds the soul in a woman who's hard as nails, and Tom Hollander and Rosamund Pike also provide excellent support. The haunting score is by Michael Nyman.
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75Depp accepts the character and all of its baggage, and works without a net.
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This film isn't pretty, but it has some kick: It is to "Shakespeare in Love" what wild pheasant is to Chicken McNuggets.
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70Johnny Depp makes a riveting antihero in a dark and bawdy period drama.
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70An interesting film, and a good one, with a harrowing performance by Depp, whose apparent enjoyment of the role seems only to increase as his character deteriorates.
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67As the depraved John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, Johnny Depp adds yet another sly sleazoid to his burgeoning portrait gallery.
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63It's a bit too muddy, dismal-looking and smoky to beguile us, too fixated on filth and too dreary-looking to really shock us.
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63Illuminated by dim candles and the rare glimmer of sun, the movie is grainy, closed-in, and likely to cause spasms of claustrophobia.
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63Johnny Depp's coruscating, rigorously uningratiating performance as debauched, self-destructive 17th-century aristocrat John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, is the glue that doesn't quite hold together first-time director Laurence Dunmore's adaptation of Stephen Jeffreys' 1994 play.
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50A movie that serves up what its debauched subject would never have countenanced -- sanitized smut with a moral attached.
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50Do we like John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester? As played by Depp, this 17th-century nobleman-cum-travesty is a carriage crash of epic proportions, and so it's difficult not to crane your neck around to get a better view of the proceedings.
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50Unfortunately, the dialogue undermines the movie's promise.
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50The Libertine's trouble lies precisely in its efforts at conjuring the historical past: No one in the film seems much more convinced than I am that because playwrights and authors wrote in clever, high post-Elizabethan diction, then everyone spoke that way every day, in the pubs, with whores.
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50The rhythms of the dialogue move to the same beat as steadily as a metronome ticks and tocks, while every sentence is polished like stone, absent the jaggedness of real breath and life. You can hear the play in this thing without even knowing it was based on a theatrical production.
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50Starting out seductive but ending up tiresome, debuting director Laurence Dunmore's pic is an honorable misfire.
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50Deep and Morton are really flying here (the scene in which the hero instructs the heroine in the passionate possibilities of her art), and they leave the rest of the film looking heavy on its feet. The second half, especially, grows dour and maundering, and by the end the movie seems to flail in desperation, more like a work in progress than like a finished piece.
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42But by the end, you're only watching to see how far Wilmot's pustules will spread, or whether his various diseases will really make his nose fall off.
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38Not since Philip Kaufman's 2000 "Quills," the story of the Marquis de Sade, have we had so debauched a literary and movie hero, and Johnny Depp plays him with the relish of an actor who has made odd-ball characters his specialty.
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38If your idea of a good time is watching a disjointed period piece featuring a scrawny dog defecating, dozens of dissipated people fornicating and a syphilitic Johnny Depp with oozing pustules on his face, The Libertine may be just the movie for you.
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38A glorious disaster.
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38What comes from the mouth of Johnny Depp...not the crucial spark of wit or insight that could encourage us to spend two hours with this cruel bore.
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33Dunmore creates a memorably grimy London, but the moral grime covering the film proves less memorable.
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30A trying experience. As we watch Rochester fall apart in spectacular fashion, it's clear that a major lure for the venturesome Depp was the chance to play a grotesque, to become a pestilent physical wreck with an artificial silver nose. There's more in that role for the actor, however, than there is for us.
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30It doesn't help matters that The Libertine seems to unload every olde English cliche on file.
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25What is most beguiling about The Libertine is that it allows Wilmot to self-destruct without ever giving us cause to care or relate.
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There is little debauchery to be had in Laurence Dunmore's adaptation of The Libertine. In fact, hedonism has never looked so bleak.
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25Despite its title, the movie could hardly be less erotic. Indeed, promiscuity has never looked more totally unappealing, and its final scenes of Wilmot's advanced venereal disease are enough to make you take a vow of celibacy. A great date movie, this is not.
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20The picture is an enormous disappointment... The result is one of the most self-consciously grimy movies on record - it looks as if the negative were developed in a mud bath.
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0The Libertine is such a torturous mess that it winds up doing something I hadn't thought possible: It renders Johnny Depp charmless.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 13 out of 22
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Mixed: 2 out of 22
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Negative: 7 out of 22
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VivW0This is where you need a minus section, just a long drawn out ramblings out of all context,vwaste of money.
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ChetR.8
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RyanC.0If I could vote -50 I would...this movie is that bad!