The Jane Austen Book Club Reviews
Top Critic
Just fine in a sentimental, mainstream kind of way. Although by constantly referencing Austen's sharp wit and characterisation, this can only ever come up short in comparison.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/6
The real disappointment is the paint-by-numbers flatness of the contemporary stories and characters; it's hard to care much about Sylvia and Prudie with Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Woodhouse hovering in the wings.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/6
This marvelously intelligent romantic comedy will captivate even those who don't know or care much about Austen, although there's undeniably an extra layer of pure delight to be found if you do.
| Original Score: 3/4
Unlike so many chick flicks that celebrate female solidarity as a concept without ever making us feel it, The Jane Austen Book Club is convincingly feminist in a nonpolitical way.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The film has an undeniable, easygoing charm. Real life is seldom so pleasingly plotted, but then real life is what people go to movies like this to get away from.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Leave it to the Godmother of Chick Lit to inspire the best chick picture in many an age.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The script might have slipped into caricature, as often the adaptations of Austen's novels have, but Swicord opts for characters in whom we might see ourselves.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
...Things never rise above the competent chick-flick level.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The episodes roll by in smooth progression, and the talkiness has the round, impassioned tones of readers ignited by fiction.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The Jane Austen Book Club could be the start of a genre.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The acting ensemble is as colorful, and thorny, as a garden of Austen archetypes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Everyone is given their due and dignity in this funny, sexy, humanist film that, if it is a chick flick, gives the genre a good name.
Despite its flaws, Book Club leaves viewers with that best result of Austen films: a wonderful ache to fall in love. It didn't pierce my soul, but it definitely lifted my spirits.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The cast alone makes The Jane Austen Book Club good -- though not great -- entertainment for at least the bookish moviegoers among us.
Austen devotees are sure to lap up the central premise that her notions of love and friendship are as relevant today as ever.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
There isn't an actress here who isn't perfect.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The Jane Austen Book Club is worth watching primarily for Blunt, the delicious scene-stealer from The Devil Wears Prada.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
This is a comfort film, the on-screen equivalent of mac and cheese -- though with a splash of truffle oil to class things up.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
[Swicord] has created characters who really do seem to have read the books and talk like they have. And she has created a book club that, like all book clubs, is really about its members.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The movie equivalent of a toenail-painting session.
As a friend said on the way out: At least no books were harmed in the making of this movie. And he's right. But that's only because no one really tried.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
An entertaining, carefully assembled piece of clockwork that imposes order on ever more complicated gender warfare.
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Swicord has a playful sense of humor and a good ear for dialogue, and the movie pleasantly accomplishes what it set out to accomplish.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
It's a funny conceit, and the actors -- who include Kathy Baker, Maria Bello, and Hugh Dancy -- are fun to watch. But the entire enterprise ultimately seems designed to turn Austen into a self-help guru.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
The Jane Austen Book Club is an admirable mix of heady and fluffy, the kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy that needn't make filmgoers ashamed of what they wished for.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Surely you must know you're still better off reading Austen on your own.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
There's comfort to be had in the plot geometry of The Jane Austen Book Club, a photogenic adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler's 2004 best-seller.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
The Jane Austen Book Club is an example of how a movie can follow the general plot of a book yet fail to capture the spirit.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
So whatever the shortcomings of this literary construct, it remains a joy to experience a movie so in love with good writing.
Cast is first-rate all around, unafraid to play up the annoying, insensitive or self-pitying aspects of their nonetheless likeable characters.
