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Evening
Focus Features


4.1

based on 33 reviews
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based on 17 votes
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FILM:

Fateless

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for some thematic elements, sexual material, a brief accident scene and language

Starring Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Vanessa Redgrave, Patrick Wilson, Hugh Dancy, Natasha Richardson, Mamie Gummer, Eileen Atkins, Meryl Streep, and Glenn Close

Evening is a deeply emotional film that illuminates the timeless love which binds mother and daughter - seen through the prism of one mother’s life as it crests with optimism, navigates a turning point, and ebbs to its close. (Focus Features)

GENRE(S):	Drama \| Romance
WRITTEN BY:	Susan Minot (also novel) Michael Cunningham
DIRECTED BY:	Lajos Koltai
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: September 25, 2007 Theatrical: June 29, 2007
RUNNING TIME:	117 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The strength of the screenplay and acting provide a satisfying, although not overwhelming, two hours of romance, drama, and tragedy.

Chicago Tribune Jessica Reaves

The film, like the book, is clear-eyed without being clinical, reflective but never maudlin.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

It resonates with gleaming ferocity as it unspools a story of regret, longing and resolution in two generations of women.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The constant shifting between today and years ago is, in and of itself, powerful.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

It's like a Harlequin romance trying to pass itself off as something deeper and more profound.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Whatever Evening is saying about life, death, and guilt isn't terribly new or interesting.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

It paints its world in pastels, but the subject cries out for vivid colors.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Susan Minot’s resplendent novel of a dying woman…stumbles on its way to the screen.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Rather than concentrate on Ann's disappointed infatuation and providing a satisfactory reason for its failure, Minot and, one suspects, Cunningham in particular, chose to flesh out the character of Buddy.

Variety Justin Chang

Individual moments are not without their felicitous touches -- mainly due to the cast, which is rich to the point of improbability.

Chicago Reader Staff (not credited)

Despite the show-offy cast, it took me a while to warm to these people and their self-consciously idyllic settings--as well as to the slick direction of former cinematographer Lajos Koltai--but I was eventually won over.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Evening is so distanced from the emotions of the story that it never breathes on its own.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

For all the creaminess of the sets and costumes, every character talks as if she is still made out of written words, not flesh, and each woman's struggles feel about as important as a tea dance.

Premiere Karl Rozemeyer

A mistake was made: Evening is a book that would have been best left on the page.

Film Threat Stina Chyn

Evening”has so much going for it. A great cast, amazing visuals, and solid directing throughout. So why did I leave the film saying aloud to the parking lot, "I didn't like it."

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

The characters, full of blue-blood archness and angst, are partial to self-conscious speechifying.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Evening might be the most shocking waste of natural resources since the despoiling of the Amazon rain forest.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Evening is a case study in how a subtly evocative book can elude the most well-intentioned filmmakers and some of our finest actors.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

The film is based on a novel by Susan Minot--one of those books where the author doesn't deign to put dialogue in quotation marks for fear of dispelling the dreamlike mood. It works on paper, but Minot, who shares credit for the adaptation with fellow novelist Michael Cunningham, doesn't understand that screenwriting is the art of taking away.

The New Yorker David Denby

This is one of the rare movies that are too sensitive for their own good.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

What a cast but what a disappointment.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The performances, especially by Hugh Dancy as a sexually confused rich kid, are overwrought, and the script, which Michael Cunningham ("The Hours") wrote in collaboration with Minot, is slack.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

High-grade cheese, the sort of highly pitched melodrama that in the 1950s would have been the stuff of a lurid, lavishly staged Douglas Sirk picture.

Village Voice Ella Taylor

Parked uneasily between sensitive indie and studio chick-flick, Lajos Koltai's Evening makes star-studded hash of Susan Minot's beautifully written, if emotionally constricted, novel.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

Evening feels like one of those devil's-candy productions that aim to bring artistry to a large audience, specifically a large audience of adult women who don't often go to the movies. Even considering it in that light, I found it miscalculated and overcooked.

Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell

The uneven filmmaking renders Minot's ideas impossibly trite.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

For all of its class-act bona fides, Evening lurches between the morose and the sentimental, with occasional incursions into the absurd.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

There are few things more depressing than a weeper that doesn't make you weep.

Time Richard Schickel

Rarely have so many gifted women labored so tastefully to bring forth such a wee, lockjawed mouse.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Doesn’t seem as if it would translate easily to the big screen. It hasn't.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Evening proves that there are such things as mistakes, by featuring two hours of bad choices and half-executed ideas.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Vanessa Redgrave spends Evening dying, and so does Evening.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Redgrave still manages to inspire awe, yet a poetically prosaic moment like the one in which she goes chasing after a butterfly is enough to throw a net over the whole thing.

The average user rating for this movie is 4.1 (out of 10) based on 17 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Dan H. gave it a10:
Great Movie, Tense exciting and romantic

France L. gave it a2:
Wrapping a film in luscious sets, peopling a film with gifted actors, decorating a film with lovely music, does not a good movie make if, at its core, it consists of poorly written dialogue, lacks any uniting tension to justify the viewer's interest, and contains too many disjointed scenes in dire need of editing.

Tony B. gave it a7:
This is a multi-textured, multi-layered film that deserves much more than it got from American audiences and critcs. Its non-linear script, superb acting and effective production design make it a winner.

Jamie B. gave it a0:
It's hard to picture in my mind that this garbage actually hit theaters. It is seriosuly the most BORING movie ever to be made.

Steve C gave it a0:
Although I have heard good things about the novel, the movie was excruciatingly bad. There isn't even the usual excuse that the author was not involved as she co-wrote the screenplay with another well-known author (and the writing was one of the worst things about the movie). Even the much-commented upon scene with Vanessa Redgrave and Meryl Streep arrives too late in this plodding picture to evoke any reaction other than "Please die soon" [addressed to Redgrave's character].

J F. gave it a0:
Halfway through the film, I had to escape, so I got up, went into the lobby and talked to the lone ticket taker about the history of the theater and life in general. Since my aged Aunt was inside … one of about 10 in a theater that could have held 400-500 … I went back. My lobby discussion was the best part of the 2 hours I spent there …. Perhaps I can make a movie based on it. My 86 year old Aunt who was looking forward to the movie said, “Why was it so long?”

Stephen S gave it a5:
Susan Minot’s Evening is an outstanding novel by an underrated writer. What’s impressive is the marriage of desperate emotion with cool technique, as dying Ann Lord drifts back to her defining youthful weekend with handsome but irresolute Harris Arden. Minot’s cascading passages cleverly match Ann’s fateful mental descents, drawing out the truth and tragedy of any life not “long enough or wide” for its owner to “know the whole of herself”. Lajos Koltai cannot translate this subtlety, and his Evening arrives as a pleasant postcard from an inconsequential director. Neither is Michael Cunningham (yep, him of The Hours, with Nicole K and her Virginia W proboscis) a sublime choice as Minot’s script collaborator. I don’t understand the gloss that is put on Harris’s rejection of Ann, nor indeed why the brilliant Minot would collaborate with pedestrians like Koltai and Cunningham. It’s only a four, but let’s give it five for Claire Dane’s vivacious turn.

Evening Focus Features

Evening
Focus Features