Pride and Prejudice Reviews
Top CriticIt's a fitfully engaging romance, it's just not Pride and Prejudice.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Keira's cat-smile suggests such supernal all-knowingness that, with Austen's adapted dialogue (via Deborah Moggach) tripping off her tongue, she comes off as an eighteenth-century Maureen Dowd.
Dare I say that even Jane Austen herself would have delighted in the final triumph of Ms. Knightley's quick-witted Elizabeth in this film? Yes, I do, and all the highbrow and middlebrow cinephobes of the world be damned.
I just feel like I've seen this so many times.
As historically authentic-looking as Pride & Prejudice is, it has far more invested in emotional authenticity -- you feel engaged every moment.
Wright's Pride is a boisterous, loud, dance-mad kind of place, full of ruddy-faced peasants, dirt and hay. The whole thing feels like it was art-directed by Bruegel on holiday.
Like the classic novel itself, the movie brings a certain sadness when the end has come and there is no more to watch.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Pride & Prejudice satisfies as dreamy romance. It's not the razor-sharp satire that Austen can be, but it's lovely entertainment.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
For the uninitiated, I can't imagine a better introduction to this classic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
This is a playful Pride, cuddly and cute and all lush English pastures, stunning sunsets and regal manor homes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The film is faithful to its source material, but not in a rigid, stodgy way. It's the rare adaptation that should please purists and dilettantes alike.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Listen up, guys, have I got a flick for you: It's all about money, sex and slammin' babes in saucy-wench get-ups, and it goes down in the same country that gave us Led Zeppelin and the Clash.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This Pride & Prejudice isn't minutely faithful to the book -- and for good reason -- but it is authentic where it counts: to the confused, wounded, eager hearts of its lovers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Seeing the splendid new version of Pride & Prejudice can be hazardous to your health: There's a very real danger of swooning.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Knightley is the best thing about this enjoyable adaptation, immediately owning the wardrobe and the words and the weather as if she were born to the manner -- and manor.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's all compelling, real and fresh.
| Original Score: 4/4
It's really in the second hour that P&P heads off in an unpersuasive melodramatic direction, signalled by a sudden overdose of piano arpeggios.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Joe Wright, in his feature-length directorial debut, accommodates the genteel gauze without neglecting the well-aimed stings.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
The spirit of this version feels fresher and more youthful than previous editions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
A stellar adaptation, bewitching the viewer completely and incandescently with an exquisite blend of emotion and wit.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Wright and Moggach open the windows on P&P and let it breathe.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A joy from start to finish. If this one doesn't inspire a rush on bookstores, nothing will.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
One of the most delightful and heartwarming adaptations made from Austen or anybody else.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
If the filmmaking is somewhat less perfect than in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, Austen fans will nonetheless delight to see their favorite characters brought to life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
A sumptuous screen adaptation of Jane Austen's 1813 novel that gathers you up on its white horse and gallops off into the sunset.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
As with so much of this Pride & Prejudice, you wish it would never end.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Pride & Prejudice is highbrow movie- making, in the finest sense of the term.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's an exuberant film adaptation of real personality -- lively, coltish, imaginatively conceived for a fluid camera.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Of Austen's novels, none is more beloved than this one, so it's good to see it once again brought to the screen with the pride which it deserves.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
If young audiences respond to it at all -- as I am sure they will -- it will be because Wright has brought out the vigor in Austen's romance in a way that the other adaptations I've seen never quite accomplished.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Knightley brings Austen's book to glorious, pulsating life.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Director Joe Wright, working from a screenplay by Deborah Moggach, has brought both romantic sweep and rich verisimilitude to Austen's story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
At a time when we seem to be inundated by one gruesome, depressing movie after another, it's reassuring to see an elegant man's pride and a stubborn woman's prejudice reach the lushly realized assertion that love conquers all.
A movie in which the search for love all but pulses with the excitement of uncertainty.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Director Joe Wright also coordinates a delightfully cohesive acting ensemble.
Any resemblance to scenes and characters created by Miss Austen is, of course, entirely coincidental.
Even the most rabid Janeites must allow that director Joe Wright, 33, has given Austen's novel a beguilingly youthful spin without compromising the novel's late-eighteenth-century manners.
| Original Score: 3/4
Anyone coming to the movie fresh and not demanding a chapter-by-chapter adaptation will respond to the pic's emotional sweep, sumptuous lensing and marvelous sense of ensemble.
With the BBC's 1995 miniseries starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle still regarded as the definitive treatment of the book, it will be an uphill struggle to win audiences to what is neither a faithful rendition nor a very interesting new interpretation.
