Golden Bowl, The

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The team's (Merchant-Ivory) best adaptation yet of a Henry James novel.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

Yet another Merchant Ivory triumph.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's splendid period filmmaking, grown-up and luxurious and gossipy without ever feeling fussy.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

If this handsome, faithful, intelligent screen adaptation of the novel doesn't leave you devastated, its ominous sense of a rarefied moral and aesthetic world bending before the accelerating streetcar of history will leave you with a mournful sense of loss.

Mr. Showbiz Kevin Maynard

A meticulously mounted film that retains the author's ambiguous characterizations yet is still emotionally accessible.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

If The Golden Bowl -- isn't charged with electric emotion, well, that's not what Henry James or James Ivory is about.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

What Merchant, Ivory and Co. arrive at is a sort of handsomely illustrated Cliffs Notes version of the novel.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Too staid and stolid for audiences on the hunt for easy entertainment.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

But it is Thurman who stands out, with a marvelous, full-blooded performance, her best in some time, as tragic Charlotte.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

I admired this movie. It kept me at arm's length, but that is where I am supposed to be; the characters are after all at arm's length from each other, and the tragedy of the story is implied but never spoken aloud.

Film.com Elizabeth Weitzman

Were the casting stronger, the film -- would have had a better chance of transcending its lack of subtlety.

New Times (L.A.) Jean Oppenheimer

Worth the price of admission if only to see the slinky Thurman decked out in a form-fitting, sequined pre-flapper era outfit. The word stunning hardly does her justice.

LA Weekly F. X. Feeney

Seen in the bowl's metaphoric reflection, Nolte's Adam, with his patronizing wish to build a great art museum to "give something back" to the poor laborers who built his fortune, is a complex American monster.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Another handsome, dramatically moribund adaptation of a grand old classic.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

There's no mirth, and precious little passion, left in this house.

Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman

If it's not perfect, it still gives pleasure to the eye.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Certainly diverting and, in Thurman, it also has a knockout of a performance.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Nolte, at least, delivers his lines with laser accuracy, and gives The Golden Bowl the life that so much cogitation could have drained from it.

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

This early-1900s costume drama surely differs from Henry James's source novel.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

What makes Nolte so much stronger than the other performers is precisely this sense of mysteriousness and indirection, which doesn't really correspond to the Adam Verver of the novel but certainly jibes with James's overall method.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

The restraint so magnificently applied in "The Remains of the Day" has simply fallen into disconnection.

USA Today Mike Clark

The movie establishes good will (or even great will) in the initial scenes because it's so gorgeous, but the rest is such a slog.

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

Dances in circles until you tire of admiring it.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Impeccably mounted, nicely scored and beautifully written.

Village Voice Jessica Winter

Though it often wallows in louche baroque textures, The Golden Bowl is perhaps the most visually accomplished of the Ivory soaps.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Henry James' tangled, turgid prose always seems to me like a thicket of thorn trees -- so I should be grateful when somebody does the job for me on film. But I'm not - at least, in the case of The Golden Bowl.

Variety Emanuel Levy

A deliberately paced literary film that takes too long to build narrative momentum and explore its central dramatic conflicts.

TV Guide Ken Fox

What is grating is the filmmakers' perennial tendency to underestimate their audiences; their lack of faith leads them to drive home each nuance with a hammer.

Washington Post Rita Kempley

Its splendor cannot be denied, but then again neither can the emptiness of this Henry James adaptation.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Takes a literary milestone of ambiguity and makes everything about it blisteringly obvious.