Atonement Reviews
Joe Wright directs Atonement with an eye to framing each performance with spectacularly vivid images, including a genuinely breathtaking tracking shot on the bloody, wreckage-strewn beach at Dunkirk.
Atonement is a film out of balance, nimble enough in its first half but oddly scattered and ungainly once it leaves the grounds of the Tallis estate.
Atonement's extraordinary qualities outweigh any quibbles.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/6
One of the few adaptations that gives a novel the film it deserves.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The kind of classically contoured love story that American filmmakers have become (almost willfully) incapable of making anymore.
A film that instantly joins the ranks of the great screen romances.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
The interpretation is so painstaking and moving that almost every moment delivers a shuddering jolt to the head and the heart.
| Original Score: 4/4
This is a film that might have contained itself better, but it still stings with bitter truth.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
In its first 45 minutes, Atonement achieves a kind of perfection rare even for big Oscar-bait movies. Every facet of the filmmaking is the equal of any picture released this year. The rest of the movie isn't so bad.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Atonement has hints of greatness but I think it falls just short of Oscar contention.
It ranks with the best novel adaptations of recent times.
As good a film as one could imagine having been made from a great work of contemporary fiction.
Atonement is not only too polite but maddeningly orderly, resulting in a prettily cast, professionally performed, impeccably mounted bore.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
On paper and on screen, Atonement is a story of rare beauty, both wrenching and wise.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Atonement takes a familiar movie environment, a setting that we think we know, and uses it for an examination of a host of dark impulses, such as jealousy, lust, cruelty and deceit.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton not only blow the Merchant-Ivory dust off the British period movie, they transform Ian McEwan's interior novel into a sweeping epic that speaks to the 21st-century soul.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It is an amazing story, filled with quiet moments of profundity and more surprises than you could imagine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Top CriticChristopher Hampton's screenplay respects the literary focus of Ian McEwan's novel without falling into the trap of becoming uncinematic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
These performers not only have the looks for a sweeping love story, they also have the skill to throw themselves into the proceedings like they really mean it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
It is mindful art doubling as unapologetic entertainment, an ode to eros and errors assembled with vision and meticulous care.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Craft is everywhere in the film, in many touches that make it elegantly forceful.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Atonement does what a tragic romance is supposed to do.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Given the difficulties in transferring Ian McEwan's trickily structured 2001 novel Atonement to the screen, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton have done a commendable job. Commendable but not electrifying.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
The movie never goes as deep as the novel (no movie could), but it's a worthy approximation: a Merchant-Ivory movie that turns in on itself with a lucid and painful sigh.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This is one of the year's best films, a certain best picture nominee.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Wright has made a film that honors the imaginative responsibility of an adapter.
The arc and resolution don't feel nearly as absorbing and devastating as McEwan's masterful novel.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Atonement is an almost classical example of how pointless, how diminishing, the transmutation of literature into film can be.
| Original Score: 2/5
Now and then you find a period picture that affords this sort of rightness of scale and satisfaction.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Screenwriter Christopher Hampton and director Joe Wright have smartly dramatized the book's wartime romance and tragedy.
In the almost spookily capable hands of 34-year-old director Joe Wright, the film version of Atonement has achieved that to which every literary adaptation should aspire.
Part highbrow British drawing-room drama, part gritty war film, all entertainment almost all the time, Atonement is a masterful study of both the hurtful and redemptive effects of imagination.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
An impeccable craftsman in the tradition of David Lean, Wright possesses the late director's considerable gifts for drawing out his actors.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Where McEwan whispers, Wright shouts.
It's just exceptionally well-crafted.
The film is gorgeous to look at, well paced (especially during the first half), and by turns touching and sad. The ending packs an emotional punch, which is what one would expect from any movie developed from a McEwan novel.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
One of the most successful adaptations of a distinguished novel I have ever seen.
Atonement is everything a true lover of literature and movies could possibly hope for. It is unquestionably, without any reservations, my favorite film of the year.
No two-hour film could ever capture all the riches of McEwan's masterly novel. But Wright and Hampton's Atonement comes tantalizingly close, while adding sensual delights all its own.
The film is absorbing and evocative.
[This] movie is abundantly attractive, every scene serenely composed, and every character so fair in love and war that, when the lights come up, it's too easy to say, ''That was good and sad and romantic and classy, now what's for dinner?''
Full Review
| Original Score: B
It's some kind of miracle. Written, directed and acted to perfection, Atonement sweeps you up on waves of humor, heartbreak and ravishing romance.
| Original Score: 4/4
Globe and Mail
Top CriticThere's much to admire about this adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel, enough that its occasional faltering can be easily forgiven.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Rarely has a book sprung so vividly to life, but also worked so enthrallingly in pure movie terms.
A noble, well-made, superbly performed and photographed (by Seamus McGarvey) semi-failure.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/6
