White Oleander Reviews
'Synthetic' is the best description of this well-meaning, beautifully produced film that sacrifices its promise for a high-powered star pedigree.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The film is worth seeing for its honest heart and for the magnificent acting.
Though it flirts with bathos and pathos and the further Oprahfication of the world as we know it, it still cuts all the way down to broken bone.
A movie that wafts in and out of clarity like a wavering transmission.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Much of the pleasure to be had in White Oleander is in watching its female stars revel in their screen time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
What should have been a guaranteed weepie is never truly moving.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It's Lohman's poise in carrying this unwieldy story that impresses you the most at the movie's end.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Call me a cynic, but there's something awfully deadly about any movie with a life-affirming message.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The picture's pretentiousness puts a drag on its running time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Redeemed by some fine performances, most notably by Lohman.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Too many of [Astrid's] experiences with adults ring false.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
This is a third-person story now, told by Hollywood, and much more ordinary for it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
...heaps so much misfortune on its main character that you half expect the poor girl to turn a corner and fall into an open manhole.
Some of the year's most arresting female performances justify White Oleander.
| Original Score: 3/4
At its best it offers pleasures similar to those of 1940s women's melodramas.
Arizona Republic
Top Critic
The film takes the materials of human tragedy and dresses them in lovely costumes, Southern California locations and star power.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
They kept much of the plot but jettisoned the stuff that would make this a moving experience for people who haven't read the book.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
In the end, White Oleander isn't an adaptation of a novel. It's a flashy, star-splashed reduction.
Even though White Oleander ... is not always compelling, it's a tribute to the strength of the book's conception and the good work that's gone into it that it retains the power to haunt us.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
What elevates White Oleander from soap opera to a small but noteworthy triumph of the human spirit is Lohman's luminous performance.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Despite the elisions necessary to making a sprawling book a trim feature-length film, White Oleander exerts undeniable power.
| Original Score: 3/4
The estrogen overload damn near did me in.
| Original Score: 2/4
The cast is phenomenal, especially the women.
| Original Score: 4/5
It's the performances that elevate White Oleander into something more substantial, none more so than Pfeiffer's portrayal of ferocious motherly love.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It plays like a synopsis, jumping from scene to scene, grief to grief, and it doesn't let us relax into the various worlds it's creating.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Impressively unflappable and natural, 23-year-old Lohman ... holds the whole plot together skillfully.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Ultimately sacrifices nuance to tidy epiphanies about personal growth.
For what it is, Kosminsky's picture is polished and effective. If only the movie had taken more risks or possessed a keener edge...
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Graced by several splendid performances and clean direction by Peter Kosminsky that shrewdly chooses to ignore most melodramatic impulses.
Never rising above routine episodic storytelling, White Oleander nonetheless retains something of its source novel's ravaged emotional surface and cool, observant manner.
