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91In a time when even the best of big Hollywood movies all seem to be mired in a certain nagging, unimaginative visual sameness, this one dares to take us to a place we haven't been before.
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90Hallström has leavened the story's bleakness with great warmth, fashioning one of the finest films of the year.
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78It's a consistently entertaining story.
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75Beside its major virtues, it contains a vice: that one flat lead performance. Who would have thought Kevin Spacey would ever go dull on us?
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75It's hardly possible to overstate what a welcome change of pace The Shipping News is for admirers of Kevin Spacey.
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75Stays engaging, chiefly, through the textured, ambiguous performances of Spacey, Moore and Dench.
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70It's worth seeing at the very least because it is so different from standard Hollywood fare.
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63The choice made by Kevin Spacey in taking on the role of Quoyle in the film adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News nearly sinks it. But not quite.
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63Despite its haunting artistry and its winning eccentricities, The Shipping News is a vehicle that's still very much at sea.
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63The Shipping News is good news, but not as good as it could have been.
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60Has a quiet sense of community, a wry, unsentimental sweetness, that grows on you. It's a patient movie for impatient times.
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50But, lord, the characters are tireless in their peculiarities; it's as if the movie took the most colorful folks in Lake Wobegon, dehydrated them, concentrated the granules, shipped them to Newfoundland, reconstituted them with Molson's and issued them Canadian passports.
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50Spacey is endearing, bringing his shy character to life despite glaring psychological gaps in the screenplay.
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50This morbid and self-consciously literary adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer-winning novel is no crowd pleaser.
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50Watching the Pulitzer-prize winning novel by E. Annie Proulx on the big screen is like being on an ocean liner stuck on a glacier.
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50Hasn't got quite the right sound as it did in Annie Proulx's novel.
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50Everything has a fusty, embalmed quality: Whatever gave the novel its vitality has been smothered.
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50A passive film, playing it quiet and safe, hoping that the viewer will extend some good will towards it.
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50In lieu of vaporous message-mongering, the languid, episodic narrative -- centering on hapless sadsack Quoyle (Spacey) -- streams along by the gentle force of a convincing melancholic undertow, a dejection and longing that's not so much surmounted as sustained.
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50Doesn't really work but has a good cast and great craggy ocean-framed scenery.
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50Seems to be playing the author's music, but like a string quartet that plays a half-beat off.
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50This atmosphere-heavy drama, with its comfortably quirky characters, elegant performances, and ever shifting tone, is so innocuous it's not worth panning.
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42A limp and sodden downer.
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40Spacey mucks up an otherwise pretty and pleasantly vague take on E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
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40Spacey is nobody's idea of a goodhearted innocent, and I wonder why nobody has told him he'll blow his career if he keeps trying to pass himself off as Mr. Sensitive. It's time to go back to playing assholes. That's what he's good at, and that's why we love him.
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40The final product is soft at the center, a rustic cinematic greeting card.
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40Kevin Spacey's pinched portrayal of Quoyle as a scared palooka rarely transcends its own artifice.
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40In the movie's best moments, the misery has a comic lilt to it. [28 Jan 2002, p. 90]
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30It's a portrayal so unconvincing it makes it close to impossible for the rest of the film to function as intended.
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30Awash in hackneyed old-time secrets and hydrophobic metaphor, never consumes us as it should.
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10The language is leaden, the pace glacial and the characters indecipherable. It's easier to read the actors -- they all seem eager to win an Oscar. Fat chance.
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