Blindness

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White

Meirelles adds another perspective, that the epidemic might be a good thing if, by being thrown into the darkness together, we may once again recognize the human family to which we all belong.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

It's a rattling, heartrending performance (Moore) in, yes, a long, hard slough of a film – one that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

It engaged me throughout and I found the ending to be surprisingly hopeful.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

At times almost unbearably ugly, but by the time you walk out of the theater, you know you've seen something.

Portland Oregonian Stan Hall

Visually nervy, beautifully acted, intense and philosophically compelling, it struggles to connect emotionally as it wrestles with the challenging source material.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

A perversely enjoyable, occasionally harrowing adaptation of José Saramago's 1995 disaster allegory.

New York Post Kyle Smith

I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

It's more like a filmed allegory.

Empire Staff (Not credited)

Handicapped by pretensions to making big statements, Blindness is still gripping, disturbing and intermittently powerful.

NPR Bob Mondello

Moore is always watchable, Ruffalo and Bernal get a nice rivalry going without ever establishing eye contact (as it were), and Danny Glover has some nice moments in an underdeveloped part as an older man who finds, to his benefit, that love is blind.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

As the players enact the fall and rebirth of civilization, Meirelles suggests that even a society gone to hell looks better with a little music-video-like pizzazz.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

There's a good movie here, but we get it in pieces that are sometimes hard to decipher.

USA Today Claudia Puig

A brilliant idea that seems to lack the vision to be great.

Washington Post Neely Tucker

An arresting, often riveting film that is fascinating to look at but not nearly so interesting to watch.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Not a great film, mainly because it can't transcend -- and, indeed, lays bare -- the intellectual flimsiness of its source. But it is, nonetheless, full of examples of what good filmmaking looks like. For all its chin-rubbing, brow-furrowing attitudes, it does not, in the end, give you much to think about. But there is, nonetheless, a lot here to see.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Blindness is provocative cinema. But it also is predictable cinema: It startles but does not surprise.

Variety Justin Chang

Meirelles' slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago's prose.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Murky and grainy, and showing human beings at their grimmest - thievery, rape, betrayal, murder - Blindness is no barrel of laughs. But it IS a barrel of pretentious metaphorical musings.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

This film is very different: chilly, methodical, a slave to 10-ton metaphor as opposed to metaphoric provocation.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

For all its pretension and artiness, Blindness is more like M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" (which at least had the decency to be fast-paced and short), right down to its upbeat and inane conclusion.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

You get the film's message, that mankind does not react well when challenged by unpleasantness it can't explain away, within the first 15 minutes -- leaving more than 100 minutes to ponderously belabor the point.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

The trouble with Blindness is that it’s so preoccupied with shouldering this symbolic weight that it gradually forgets to tell a story--to keep faith with the directives of common sense.

Village Voice Anthony Kaufman

Unflinching at best and treacly at worst, the film unveils its apocalyptic scenario with visceral intensity, but lacks the emotional sophistication to rise above schadenfreude kicks.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

An extended metaphor for the condition of man, and boy is it extended. In the course of two hours that crawl by like four and a half.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

A feel-nothing movie – a series of disconnected, implausible incidents that end as arbitrarily as they began, in an effort to inspire emotions the picture never justifies.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

What was presumably intended to play like a fable plays, instead, like an overly long car commercial crossed with a scare-mongering public service announcement.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

After a powerful opening, when we see the first victim suddenly go blind while driving in traffic, the film devolves into a dystopian freak show and wastes many wonderful performers, including Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore.

New York Daily News Staff (Not credited)

Piles on the indignities, violence and island-of-man turmoil.

Film Threat Matthew Sorrento

The able cast can't swim through the muck.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

This ends on an uplifting and philosophical note, equating moral blindness with the literal sort, which you'll probably appreciate if you haven't already slit your wrists.