The Great Gatsby Reviews
Top CriticIt's stupefying, it's vulgar, it's demeaning-it's dull and there's nothing like the dullness that is trying to be a sensation.
There are no two ways about it: The Great Gatsby is misconceived and misjudged, a crude burlesque on what's probably American literature's most precious jewel.
The central problem with Luhrmann's film is that when it's entertaining it's not Gatsby, and when it's Gatsby it's not entertaining.
The best attempt yet to capture the essence of the novel.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
A failure that should have at least been a magnificent mistake.
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| Original Score: 2/4
"The Great Gatsby" is a cool movie, in both the positive and negative sense. You may certainly be impressed, but you may not be moved.
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| Original Score: B-
It's a terrific adaptation that succeeds not only as a work of cinema but also, wonderfully, as proof of the novel's greatness.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The best thing about Baz Luhrmann's much-anticipated/much-dreaded The Great Gatsby is that, for all its computer-generated whoosh and overbroad acting, it is unmistakably F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. That is no small deal.
It is, as I suspected, a gargantuan hunk of over-art-directed kitsch, but it makes for a grandiose, colorful, pleasure-drenched night at the movies.
This dreadful film even derogates the artistry of Fitzgerald, who wrote "The Great Gatsby" while living on Long Island and in Europe.
Luhrmann takes great care with the rhythms of individual scenes, yet the film as a whole plays like a long trudge through a familiar story.
As unlikely as it might seem, high-energy director Baz Luhrmann has in fact crafted a somnambulant motion picture.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Baz Luhrmann is exactly the wrong person to adapt such a delicately rendered story, and his 3D feature plays like a ghastly Roaring 20s blowout at a sorority house.
Luhrmann hasn't unlocked the secrets of a story that remains all but unfilmable, but his Gatsby is far more than a collection of superficial splashes and tics.
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| Original Score: B
Even while being admirably faithful to so much of the novel's language, Luhrmann and Pearce still can't quite maneuver Carraway's more cautionary contours about America.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Despite timely relevance, enduring truths and Luhrmann's earnest efforts to make The Great Gatsby jump off the screen, he -- and we -- finally can't help but fail to grasp it.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Fitzgerald's sensibility is delicately nuanced, but there's steel in his melancholy. With Luhrmann, everything, not just the parties but the intimate scenes, turns into Mardi Gras.
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| Original Score: C-
Leonardo DiCaprio gives us the full Gatsby, assured yet insecure, and he's magnificent, but the movie ends up romanticizing what Fitzgerald spent the book de-romanticizing.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Maguire's otherworldly coolness suits the observer drawn into a story he might prefer only to watch. DiCaprio is persuasive as the little boy lost impersonating a tough guy, and Mulligan finds ways to express Daisy's magnetism and weakness.
Old dogs who don't believe in new tricks can howl about sacrilege, but for those attuned to the movie, "The Great Gatsby" is the cat's meow.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The themes are spelled out with all the refinement of Cliffs Notes. The CGI gimmicks add nothing relevant (skip the 3-D ticket). And few of the actors seem at all comfortable amid the decadence.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Although the incurably exuberant Baz Luhrmann had the glitter factories and sequin mines working overtime, his glitzed-up "Gatsby" is dishwater dull.
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| Original Score: 2/4
There have been other stabs at Fitzgerald's book ... But none can be deemed as audaciously miscalculated as this.
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| Original Score: 2/4
We're ... reminded of what this movie could have been, had not Luhrmann hit the autopilot switch and allowed Fitzgerald to do all the dramatic thinking for him.
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| Original Score: 2/4
There may be worse movies this summer than The Great Gatsby, but there won't be a more crushing disappointment.
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| Original Score: 1/4
Frenzied and overwrought, Baz Luhrmann'sThe Great Gatsby is a glitz-filled folly.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The real star of any Baz Luhrmann film must be Baz Luhrmann. And he wears out his welcome very early.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The result is less a conventional movie adaptation than a splashy, trashy opera, a wayward, lavishly theatrical celebration of the emotional and material extravagance that Fitzgerald surveyed with fascinated ambivalence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Where this "Gatsby" fails, it at least does so with imaginative and verve; where it succeeds, it finds poetry.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Even when the movie's not working, its style fascinates. That "not working" part is a deal breaker, though ...
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
There's always something to watch. But the actors' efforts to get something going the old-fashioned way - by interacting with each other, in the service of the characters - get shoved to the sidelines, in favor of one more blast of glitter.
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| Original Score: 2/4
On paper "Gatsby" sounds like quite the film. On screen, though, things start to fall apart.
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| 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.
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.
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| Original Score: B-
It is DiCaprio who really burrows into the soul and the marrow of a classic. Luhrmann just grazes it.
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| Original Score: 3/4
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.
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.
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| 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.
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.
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| Original Score: 2/5
A movie that may not be truly great but certainly stands out like a beacon in a sea of silly blockbusters.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The fourth adaptation of the Fitzgerald novel scores some hits and wild misses, but DiCaprio nails the bull's-eye.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Fitzgerald's illusions were not very different from Gatsby's, but his illusionless book resists destruction even from the most aggressive and powerful despoilers.
What Luhrmann grasps even less than previous adapters of the tale is that Fitzgerald was, via his surrogate Carraway, offering an eyewitness account of the decline of the American empire, not an invitation to the ball.
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.
This film marks the official moment in which Baz Luhrmann's signature style has become self-parody. So we beat on, boats against the current, jumping the shark.
