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
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
Top CriticDiCaprio 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
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+
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
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
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
Film Journal International
Jay-Z meets Jay G in this hyperventilated version of F. Scott's eloquent novel about an enigmatic self-made millionaire-the film isn't for purists, but Baz should generate a buzz with young audiences.
SSG Syndicate
Sumptuous, exquisitely gaudy spectacle, emphasizing style over substance and filled with extrvagant parties to which we wish we'd been invited.
Full Review
| Original Score: 7/10
A movie that may not be truly great but certainly stands out like a beacon in a sea of silly blockbusters.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Hollywood & Fine
Luhrmann does find the beating heart at the center of this overstuffed enterprise. It rests firmly in the person of Leonardo DiCaprio's Jay Gatsby,
The fourth adaptation of the Fitzgerald novel scores some hits and wild misses, but DiCaprio nails the bull's-eye.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Thompson on Hollywood
The film builds from an early small-scale Bacchanalia in a gaudy pink New York pied-a-terre to the giant-scale choreographed chaos of the Gatsby party centerpiece, the tour-de-force that makes the movie a must-see.
The cast is first-rate, the ambiance and story provide a measure of intoxication and, most importantly, the core thematic concerns pertaining to the American dream, self-reinvention and love lost, regained and lost again are tenaciously addressed.
On 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.
For the most part, the actors never sync up with Luhrmann's jitterbug rhythm.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
