Average Rating: 5.5/10
Reviews Counted: 16
Fresh: 8 | Rotten: 8
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 5.5/10
Critic Reviews: 5
Fresh: 2 | Rotten: 3
No consensus yet.
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Average Rating: 3.8/5
User Ratings: 2,487
The logic behind inflating Robert Bolt's minimalist romantic drama Ryan's Daughter into a 12-million-dollar epic seems to have been "When David Lean directs, it's a super-spectacular." Sarah Miles (who at the time was married to Robert Bolt) stars as Rosy, the daughter of Irish pub keeper Tom Ryan (Leo McKern). Married to tweedy, sexless schoolmaster Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum), restless Rosy has an affair with British officer Randolph Doryan (Christopher Jones). When village idiot
Nov 9, 1970 Wide
MGM Home Entertainment
All Critics (16) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (9) | Rotten (10) | DVD (13)
Overlength of perhaps 30 minutes serves to magnify some weaknesses of Robert Bolt's original screenplay, to dissipate the impact of the performances, and to overwhelm outstanding photography and production.
Those who were jealous of [Lean's] previous successes decried the film as an utter failure, though of course it is not, it just isn't quite as good as his other movies.
It doesn't transfigure the world. It embalms it.
A disappointing failure of tone, a lush and overblown self-indulgence in which David Lean has given us a great deal less than meets the eye.
It's insanely overproduced in Lean's standard epic style, yet somehow the crazy mismatches in scale contribute to the film's sense of romantic delirium.
Arguably David Lean's weakest film, this lushly photographed (it won Oscar for Freddie Young) period Irish romance is rambling and pointless, and feels like an occasion for Sarah Miles (then married to writer Bolt) to show off her beautiful body.
The best thing about this much-vaunted, overlong Irish epic love triangle is its gorgeous photography.
Imagine the 'straight A' student who receives, deservedly, a 'B' on his term project and you will capture the quandary surrounding David Lean's 1970 mega-feature
An awe-inspiringly tedious lump of soggy romanticism.
Some hippie-dippiness dates the picture, but the vérité posturing of Lean's peers looks a lot kitschier in retrospect
If you are looking for a breath of fresh Eire, you are in the wrong movie.
At 206 minutes, it should have been titled Orion's Daughter for its constellation-sized proportions.
Ryan's Daughter takes far too long to say much too little.
Lean's depiction of provincial Ireland during the unrest of 1916 may suffer a little from its rather worthy romanticism, but this does not dilute its powerful, epic vision.
Visually stunning but dramatically drawn out love story. This takes far too long to tell it's sad tale but good performances and once again absolutely breathtaking cinematography compensate a great deal. The storm sequence is one of the most beautifully shot scenes I've ever seen in any film.
January 21, 2010
Super Reviewer
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