Disgrace Reviews
November 17, 2011
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
December 4, 2009
Surprisingly successful adaptation.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
December 4, 2009
It's an enormously complicated story with great potential for reductive schmaltz, but this is avoided thanks to Anna Maria Monticelli's sharp, sensitive screenplay and superb performances.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
December 4, 2009
It's hard to say what this solid but unadventurous film adds to Coetzee's powerful source material.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
December 4, 2009
A worthwhile film which is concerned to do the right thing by a modern classic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
December 4, 2009
It's a faithful adaptation, but one that's been indifferently shot by director Steve Jacobs, whose blunt technique tends to flatten the book's morose charge. Still, the acting is often excellent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
December 4, 2009
This disquieting drama serves as a platform for Malkovich, whose eloquent performance draws you in with great compassion.
December 4, 2009
As the last shot lingers, you long to find out what happens next.
December 4, 2009
This is tragic inevitability at one mile per hour, extending into a slow, sunbaked danse macabre the drama's heartbreak and the guilt, anguish and wrath.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
December 4, 2009
The visionary gravity of J M Coetzee's Booker-winning novel is perhaps untranslatable to the screen, but Steve Jacobs's film is a very creditable try.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
October 2, 2009
The movie eventually begins to wilt under the sober, plodding direction of Steve Jacobs, but the thoughtful screenplay gives Malkovich a complex, increasingly reflective character arc that he plays with great feeling.
September 25, 2009
Demanding but ultimately rewarding...
September 25, 2009
Unfortunately, though Malkovich remains a compelling and cerebral screen presence, he comes off as too innately detached and prickly to elicit much empathy (not that his character is asking for it, mind you).
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
September 24, 2009
Disgrace is an ugly movie, at times torturous to watch. It probably needs to be.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
September 24, 2009
I awaited the closing scenes of Disgrace with a special urgency, because the story had gripped me deeply but left me with no idea how it would end. None -- and I really cared.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
September 23, 2009
Newcomer Jessica Haines is transparent and heartbreaking as the prof's unorthodox daughter, a victim of violence as the old ways crumble.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
September 18, 2009
Steve Jacobs' elegantly disturbing film follows the exploits - or, more accurately, the exploitations - of 52-year-old professor David Lurie, a dissolute aesthete whose erudition does little to mask grotesque character flaws.
Full Review
| Original Score: 8/10
September 18, 2009
After a compelling opening act and some shocking late-film developments, the film feels disengaged from the action at hand and the issues raised.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
September 18, 2009
I cannot tell a lie. I derive great satisfaction watching John Malkovich act.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
September 18, 2009
A faithful, compelling screen adaptation of J. M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel.
Original Score: 4/5