The Great Gatsby Reviews
New England Movies Weekly
...one wishes Baz Luhrmann had pursued a career as an art director rather than as a filmmaker.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
LarsenOnFilm
If you're able to make it through the first party scene at Gatsby's mansion, you'll come out on the other side to find a film of surprising restraint and patience.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Top CriticOn paper "Gatsby" sounds like quite the film. On screen, though, things start to fall apart.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
It surely belongs to the category of baroque, overblown, megalomaniacal spectacles dubbed "film follies" by longtime Nation film critic Stuart Klawans.
Hollywood.com
DiCaprio's Gatsby takes the movie's breath away, forcing Luhrmann to put aside his song and dance infatuation for dazzling performances in the heightened world he's created.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
The Movie Minute
Audacious, over-long, and, occasionally dazzling, Baz Luhrmann has delivered an adaptation that's imperfect but also pretty darn fascinating.
Full Review
| Original Score: 7/10
DiCaprio has aged into roles like this with a certain grace. He carries himself with the self-confidence Gatsby would, but also manages the shade of doubt, that it's all false bravado.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
For the most part, the actors never sync up with Luhrmann's jitterbug rhythm.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
It is DiCaprio who really burrows into the soul and the marrow of a classic. Luhrmann just grazes it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Baz Luhrmann's visually exhilarating "The Great Gatsby" has flash, dash and a modern soundtrack. Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire are terrific.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
And so we wait, wait for the parties to end, wait for sparks to fly, for tragedy to strike, for repercussions to ensue, for our persistently passive protagonist to simply shut up already.
Slant Magazine
This is a film which takes classic source material and imbues it on screen with a sense of wonder commensurate to its prior form, perhaps offering an even more visceral impression of the possibilities inherent to this beautiful, tragic world.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Spirituality and Practice
Yet another screen version of the 1925 novel where style trumps substance, leaving us yearning for some characters who can engage our emotions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Las Vegas Informer
Maguire open-mouth stupefaction dominates, Mulligan is miscast, and DiCaprio does his best to save his dignity.
Movie Nation
So what if it's not literally "The Great American novel"? DiCaprio gives the best performance of his career, and he and the movie "get" Gatsby.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
I love the publicity quotes by Baz Luhrmann stating that his intention was to make an epic romantic vision that is enormous. Also: overwrought, asinine, exaggerated and boring. But in the end, about as romantic as a pet rock.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
[Luhrmann's] "Great Gatsby" is all about the glitter but it has no soul - and the fact that he's directed it in 3-D only magnifies the feeling of artificiality.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
It seldom, if ever, captures that fierce delicacy of feeling Fitzgerald packed into every sentence. And it's not an actors' movie.
amNewYork
This enormous movie is as much of a reflection of its protagonist as its director, offering a window into an exclusive world as it is conceived and formed in a dream.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The anachronistic pop-music cues, digitally augmented tracking shots and disco-globe-glittery production design don't re-create the headiness of early-20th-century New York so much as invent a billowy fantasy otherworld in the gauzy vein of Twilight.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
