Blue Jasmine Reviews
Top CriticYou have to dig deep in Allen's back catalogue to find a single performance as affecting and well-judged as the one Cate Blanchett delivers.
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| Original Score: 4/5
It's narratively uneven but the occasional lapses of focus are rescued by Cate Blanchett's riveting lead performance.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This also benefits from one of the strongest casts he's assembled in years: Cate Blanchett is exceptional in the lead, and there are strong supporting turns from Alec Baldwin, Sally Hawkins, and (in a surprise dramatic turn) Andrew Dice Clay.
Jasmine resembles one of those '50s wives -- widowed or dumped -- who find themselves with nary a skill to survive, or at least not in the manner they'd grown accustomed.
Just when it seemed like Allen was going to settle for cranking out a comic bauble every year for the rest of his career, he comes up with a vital and vibrant knockout of a movie.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
As Jasmine's story is revealed, and as Blanchett manages the fragile mask of her character's sanity, the film builds to a mighty emotional pitch.
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| Original Score: A+
A wrenching portrait of a woman whose life has fallen apart.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Blanchett is steady as she goes, delivering one of the most exhilarating performances of the year.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Despite some thin writing, it's Allen's weightiest work in years.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Blanchett excels at every turn, from the haughty airs and headstrong sense of entitlement to the fragile and inevitable disintegration that made the hair on my arms stand up.
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| Original Score: A-
There's never been a better director of women than Woody Allen. Actresses in his films have earned five Oscars from 11 nominations. Cate Blanchett in "Blue Jasmine" should make it an even dozen.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Allen is a famously hands-off director, and while this method succeeds on occasion, too many scenes in Blue Jasmine betray a directorial negligence.
Blanchett owns this movie as thoroughly as her character owns her delusions.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Blanchett in "Blue Jasmine" is beyond brilliant, beyond analysis. This is jaw-dropping work, what we go to the movies hoping to see, and we do. Every few years.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It isn't always easy to watch. It isn't exactly fun (although parts are funny). Blanchett's performance sometimes overpowers the story. But it's an essential work in Allen's later canon.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Plenty of fine actresses have delighted in Allen's snappish comic rhythms, which the writer never really loses, even in drama. Or in drama borrowed from Tennessee Williams.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It holds its own thanks to Blanchett's stunning take on Jasmine, whose incandescent and ongoing meltdowns are mesmerizing to behold.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Allen's story of a fictitious Ruth Madoff figure works as both a what-if comedy and a penetrating psychological portrait. Major credit goes to Blanchett, raw and funny and astounding as ever.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Allen's best movie in some years and certainly his finest drama with comedy since 2005's "Match Point," it is a tale of wealth, greed and corruption -- and the shock waves that occur when crimes lead to punishment.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Why should we care about Jasmine? For me, the best reason was Blanchett's all-out performance, which is often frighteningly vivid.
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| Original Score: B
Somewhat less than the sum of its parts, Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine'' showcases a brilliant, Oscar-worthy performance by Cate Blanchett as sort of a WASP version of Ruth Madoff.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Blanchett's lavish, almost operatic turn as Jasmine sloshes against the sides of this insubstantial movie like liquid in a too-small container (maybe the room-temperature Stoli Jasmine is continually downing).
[Blanchett's] bravura performance is tinged with haughtiness, dry humor and madness. It's one of the year's finest, most complex portrayals, in one of Allen's best films in years.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The plotting is wooden, the flashbacks lazy, the adoption device a bad joke, and as always, everyone stammers like Woody.
The movie's observations about economic disparity are cloaked in zestful comedy that's broad or stiletto-sharp.
For all of "Blue Jasmine's" darkness, the movie is among the filmmaker's most emotionally affecting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
It's a movie of quiet moments (and one startling revelation). But it is a dramatic slice of life, and it lives fully in a darkness Allen's only occasionally kept at bay.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Sooner or later a major film-maker has to give us someone we will never forget. Jasmine is that someone.
This is one strange, sometimes uneven but mostly mesmerizing film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
Want to see great acting, from comic to tragic and every electrifying stop in between? See Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The way [Blanchett] anchors this superb dramedy is a thing of beauty.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Allen observes Jasmine's allure and disease without penetrating her soul. That makes for a movie that is both intimate and disinterested, as if Jasmine were a flailing insect in a barren terrarium.
In all, this is the strongest, most resonant movie Woody Allen has made in years.
There's something cathartic about a contemporary film that's willing to explore madness as an expression of who a person really is.
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| Original Score: A
A freak show whose alternately compelling and repulsive heroine can't disguise the fact that it's a movie by a sour old guy who no longer likes anything or anyone and who also, more damningly, just isn't interested.
I do not consider Jasmine a typical Woody Allen comedy. It's better than anything you might imagine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Is ''Blue Jasmine'' an Occupy Wall Street-era morality tale, or just a deeply absorbing character study? Either way, Allen has given us a whole lot to chew on - and a flawed heroine we'll remember for a long time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Only Andrew Dice Clay, in a small role as Ginger's Low-Class(TM) onetime husband, pierces the movie's highly polished bubble world; he comes off as a person whose veins run with blood rather than some liquefied director's conceit.
Cate Blanchett is neurotically golden in another memorable female character study from Woody Allen.
[Allen's] new drama Blue Jasmine comes this close to being a wheeze. But he sells it beautifully.
"Woody Allen's best film since 1994's 'Bullets Over Broadway.'"
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| Original Score: 8.5 / 10
The essence of Blue Jasmine feels timely, even years into America's limp rebound from recession: How do we start over, when guilt can't be fully processed and sacrifice is demeaned?
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
A meaty, fully realized drama that cleverly functions as both an update of "A Streetcar Named Desire" and a satire on One Percent excess.
