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03/03/02
An Ideal Husband (1999)
87
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:54
Fresh:47
Rotten:7
Average Rating:7.4/10
Consensus: Brevity is the soul of wit, eh? This adaptation gets to the nitty gritty of Wilde's stage piece and plays on eternal human foibles.
Runtime: 1 hr 38 mins
Genre: Comedies
Synopsis: Sir Robert Chiltern (Northam) is a successful Government minister with a loving wife. He is threatened when a lady (Moore) appears with damning evidence of a past misdeed. Sir Robert turns for help... [More]
Starring: Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver
Director: Oliver Parker
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Reviews for An Ideal Husband
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05/11/01
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05/10/01
Top CriticWilde was always about lots more than witty repartee, and as sparkling as his play is as drawing-room comedy, it reveals his concern with the timeless values of unselfish love and forgiveness.
02/14/01
Top CriticThis Husband tries desperately to squeeze itself into the trim style of other bustle and bonnet faves, but it's a bad fit.
01/01/00
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01/01/00
Thankfully, Oliver Parker's An Ideal Husband takes complete advantage of Wilde's gifts, seamlessly infusing his snide wit and wry humor into an engagingly complicated story.
01/01/00
[The] film is hardly memorable, but it's amusing enough for two hours, and it never panders or cloys.
01/01/00
Top CriticIt is, of course, an ensemble piece and the entire cast brings it together with skill and style under Parker's skillful direction.
01/01/00
An Ideal Husband retains the wit of Wilde, and updates it... [it] is a smart comedy that manages to deliver social commentary while focusing primarily on relationships between its characters.
01/01/00
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01/01/00
Only during the final reel, when the players and the camera are suddenly afflicted with a bad case of the cutesies, does this highly entertaining film feel out of balance.
01/01/00
Pleasantly diverting, but unlikely to inspire the kind of deep thinking about hypocrisy and unreasonable standards of virtue that Wilde intended
01/01/00
Such an adaptation comes across effectively because the writer's topics are not limited to certain time periods.
01/01/00
It's almost as much of a visual treat as was the 1948 Alexander Korda version.
01/01/00
I felt like I was being one-lined to a loving death in this elegant Oscar Wilde comedy/drama costume play...
01/01/00
Leave it up to director Oliver Parker's An Ideal Husband, based loosely on famed 19th-century writer Oscar Wilde's play, to prove that all a period film needs to jump vibrantly to life is a remarkable cast.
01/01/00
[T]his Husband plods and ambles and bears the burden of a soundtrack that resembles a wimpy meditation tape.
01/01/00
Top CriticAn Ideal Husband is an entertaining, light-as-a-feather production, as funny as it is affecting.
01/01/00
Parker does an admirable job of translating Wilde's often static, emotionally distant collection of one-liners into a fairly hot morass of straitlaced morals pitted against barely repressed passions...
01/01/00
Latest News for An Ideal Husband
May 13, 2005:
Trailer Bulletin: "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"
Right here at Rotten Tomatoes you can enjoy the all-new trailer for the upcoming and highly anticipated movie version of C.S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion,... More...
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