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88It's a very classy, finely made film, and, as one watches it -- particularly those last sweeping scenes of political turbulence and escape -- one feels both pain at their (Merchant-Ivory) parting and grateful for what, together, they achieved.
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83I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that this oasis of romance amid the turmoil of Shanghai represents the way that Merchant and Ivory, for 40 years, saw themselves: as a sanctuary of calming, life-size taste in a movie culture grown coarse. It was often far from perfect, but I'll miss that sanctuary.
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83The movie works best as spectacle: as a piece of old-style, non-CGI, on-location epic filmmaking.
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75Richardson -- acting with her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, who plays her aunt, and her aunt Lynn Redgrave, who plays her mother -- finds the story's grieving heart. Fiennes is her match in soulful artistry.
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75Fiennes and Richardson make this film work with the quiet strangeness of their performances; if they insist on their eccentricities, it's because they've paid them off and own them outright.
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75Its sumptuous, stately pace will wither the patience of countless moviegoers, but the impressively acted and gorgeously exotic The White Countess improves the longer you mull its complexities.
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75Following his triumphs in "The Constant Gardener" and "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," Fiennes is superb as Todd.
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75Any resemblance between this film and "Casablanca" is purely deliberate.
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75This is Merchant-Ivory's kind of showmanship, the unflashy adult variety of movie magic that they made their hallmark.
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75The film takes a long time to unfold, and some scenes feel inert. But ultimately, the conclusion is moving and satisfying.
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75Fiennes's performance, tricky and impassioned, is the showpiece.
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75For gourmands who appreciate this sort of cinematic comfort food, though, The White Countess is a fitting finale for the producer.
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75It offers top actors in Fiennes and Richardson, plus a rare joint appearance by the sisters Redgrave.
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70The director has staged the elaborate production in his usual stately but impressive manner, and the production values boast the usual Merchant/Ivory stamp of quality.
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70As with so many Merchant-Ivory films, The White Countess glides along on restrained, skillful performances and tapestry-rich cinematography, but its beating heart lies deep below the surface, where only determined viewers will find it.
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70Combines a delayed-gratification romance and rumblings of war.
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63In any case, the movie moves only when she's (Richardson) in the center of it, and her complex performance as a woman balancing her dignity with her survival instincts is one of the year's very best.
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60Trouble is, James Ivory just doesn't do sleaze. The tawdry milieu of taxi dancers, pleasure-seekers and spies rings hollow.
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60The White Countess takes place in a fascinating time and place, rife with conflict and turmoil. But to watch Fiennes float (and Richardson trudge) through it all, absorbed in themselves and their own private misery, is to wish they'd started falling earlier, if only to knock some sense into them.
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60With its tentative pace, fussy, pieced-together structure and stuffy emotional climate, The White Countess never develops any narrative stamina.
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50Ivory's last minute decision to render his hero sightless may make certain symbolic sense, but creates an even greater distance between Jackson and the woman he must inevitably come to love; their dull self-restraint makes "The Remains of the Day" look like soft-core porn.
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50A watchable disappointment. Sumptuous to look at, tastefully dull, and ultimately rather silly.
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50This last Merchant/Ivory film feels like a thin apparition of the team's best films -- similarly static but less substantial, less palpable, and sadly less respectable, just the vestigial remains of a better day.
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50Cinematographer Christopher Doyle suffuses the film with color, fire and smoke. But the more lively his images become, the more faded the characters seem.
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50Moves with the stately speed of most Merchant/Ivory productions, which is to say too damn slow, but the film is snatched from the jaws of tedium by Doyle's resplendently lush camerawork and Fiennes and Richardson's spot-on performances.
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50I have the greatest respect for Kazuo Ishiguro, whose wonderful novel "The Remains of the Day" became one of the best films in the Merchant-Ivory oeuvre. But the combination of his stately writing and James Ivory's stately directing, even when pepped by Christopher Doyle's fizzy cinematography, makes for fatally low-key viewing.
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50This romantic tragedy has the measured gentility of the M.I. classics, but its sheen of crass melodrama is startling, and its many metaphors run amok in a tangle.
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50This final production from the team of James Ivory and the late Ismail Merchant is itself adrift in more ways than one, with a literate but meandering script by "The Remains of the Day" novelist Kazuo Ishiguro that withholds emotional payoffs to an almost perverse degree.
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40Alas, The White Countess, the final Merchant Ivory film, is something of a lacquered dud.
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40Despite its brilliant evocation of this great city at this most provocative time in history, the movie just gets sillier and sillier.
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Positive: 3 out of 5
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Mixed: 2 out of 5
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BobC6
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MarkB.5
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PatG.4