My Blueberry Nights

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Captures the overwhelming and uncontrollable emotional assault of loving and living through captured moments and sensuous images.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Wildly romantic.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's a stylish and sweet film with moments of affecting brilliance that counterbalance its flaws.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Despite its flaws, the film has the same dreamy, romantic melancholy that distinguishes Wong's best films.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Wong's visions of a New York café, a Memphis bar, and a Vegas casino--not to mention the swaths of beautiful country in the Southwest--have that enveloping quality that make his films so persistently seductive. The natives should feel flattered.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Norah Jones, making her big-screen debut as a wistful wanderer, is a beautiful blank, and the fragments barely add up to a movie.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

All this is frustrating, as the picture contains a few grace notes that remind one what an acute filmmaker Wong can be.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Music and nostalgia are what fuel all this filmmaker's movies, though, even a half-baked translation like this one.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

The director is chasing a mood here -- a mood, an atmosphere and feelings -- much as he did in "In the Mood for Love."

Variety Todd McCarthy

As much a trifle as its title suggests, My Blueberry Nights sees Hong Kong stylist Wong Kar Wai applying his characteristic visual and thematic doodles to a wispy story of lovelorn Yanks.

Village Voice Michelle Orange

The disappointment here doesn't have much to do with Wong doing America--he's been doing America for years, even in Chinese--but with Wong doing Wong, and not up to his own standard.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

My Blueberry Nights may not quite be what fans of either Jones or Wong Kar-wai -- directing his first film in English -- are expecting. It's a late-night, lovelorn mood piece in a minor key, not complicated or convoluted, finally more confection than substance.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Isn’t eye candy; it’s a drool-worthy slice of eye pie.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Often ponderous, sometimes pretentious and mostly clichéd, this contrived meditation on longing and loss feels like a missed opportunity.

Wall Street Journal Joanne Kaufman

Alternately precious and vapid, the movie attempts to wrest metaphors from a jar of house keys, and eternal verities from pastry. Slice the pie how you will, it's still half-baked.

New York Post V.A. Musetto

The biggest problem is Wong's decision to cast Norah Jones as Elizabeth, a New Yorker who hits the road after a love affair goes bad. Jones, in her first movie, can't act. (There, I said it!)

The New York Times A.O. Scott

After 90 minutes of My Blueberry Nights, which pass pleasantly enough, with swirly, mood-saturated colors; lovely faces; and nice music, you may feel a bit logy yourself -- filled up, sugar-addled, but not really satisfied.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

A stunner of a movie. But all those gorgeous images never add up to a full picture.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai has an undeservedly high reputation as a master stylist. He's more like a master window dresser.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

The use of recognizable movie stars doesn't help, r serve Wong's style. My Blueberry Nights" should have played like a memory, but its hard-living, luckless losers are too beautiful to be believed.

Slate Dana Stevens

There's a curious mismatch between the surface of the movie and what lies beneath it. Wong's technique is layered and detailed like a couture gown, but the story it hangs on is as generic as a seamstress's dress form.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

Even with dyed hair, heavy makeup and a cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, Portman still looks like a schoolgirl pretending to be somebody's mom.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

There are momentary pleasures, to be sure – a corker of a kiss here, an Otis Redding-backed barroom slink there – but frankly, I'm a little weary of Wong wearing "that same old shaggy dress."

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It's beautiful to look at, but there's little there to savor.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

In these dusty American settings, the wistful melancholy of Wong's earlier movies seems fairly contrived.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Fractured, tentative, oh-so-artsy and very much in the style of Wong's previous Hong Kong-set boy-meets-girl movies. But this time, the effect is contrived: a star-driven pseudo-indie affair that will please neither celebrity worshipers nor cineastes.