What my dad was getting at, I think, is something that even those of us who like the show have suspected on occasion. It's what I think of as The Titanic issue: we read and read about the exact replication of every stateroom fitting, each dish, each deck railing. But then we had Rose, supposedly a 1912 lady of 18. giving someone the finger. Of course, Mad Men would never succumb to that level of anachronism - how often have we read the reverent accounts of danishes exactly the right size, or light bulbs the correct brightness? - but when it does happen, it serves to make everything feel affected, precious, self-conscious. In one of the best reviews I've ever seen of the show, the Atlantic's Benjamin Schwarz writes,

But even if the portrayal were as "dead-on" as The Times assures us it is, that portrayal is hardly neutral. In describing a scene in which sexist badinage is exchanged at an account meeting, McLean correctly points out that "the series is critical of this limited view and is not afraid to spell [its criticism] out." That stance-which amounts to a defiant indictment of sexism and racism, sins about which a rough moral consensus would now seem to have formed-militates against viewers' inhabiting the alien world the show has so carefully constructed, because it's constantly pressing them to condemn that world...And that stance is responsible for the rare (and therefore especially grating) heavy-handed and patronizing touches in an otherwise nuanced drama. Must the only regular black characters be a noble and cool elevator operator, a noble and understanding housekeeper, and a perceptive and politicized supermarket clerk? Must said elevator operator, who goes unnoticed by the less sensitive characters, sagely say when discussing Marilyn Monroe's death, "Some people just hide in plain sight"? Get it-he's talking about himself. He's invisible. Even worse, that stance evokes and encourages the condescension of posterity; just as insecure college students feel they must join the knowing hisses of the callow campus audience when a character in an old movie makes an un-PC comment, so Mad Men directs its audience to indulge in a most unlovely-because wholly unearned-smugness. As artistically mistaken as this stance is, it nonetheless helps account for the show's success. We all like to congratulate ourselves, and as a group, Mad Men's audience is probably particularly prone to the temptation.

Therein, for me, lies the problem: we're never with the characters, exactly - we're coming from the place of enlightenment. We're all winking and nudging each other all the time, feeling like we're understanding a past which is really just our modern conception of it. Unlike other things (hello, Glee!) I don't enjoy criticizing Mad Men, because I so want to love it. I want it to be perfect and smart and never fall into heavy-handed portraits of Lives of Quiet Desperation. Sometimes I think in our desire to love it, we fall into the reductive trap of assuring ourselves that They Know What They're Doing, and if Mad Men does it, with their intelligence and commitment to accuracy, it must be right! And when something is wrong, not accurate, well, we'd rather assume they're right than acknowledge other, larger things could be equally anachronistic. For instance, Schwarz points to another niggling problem, something a friend and I were talking about just the other day.

Betty, the show establishes, was in a sorority. So far, okay. Pretty, with a little-girl voice and a childlike, almost lobotomized affect; humorless; bland but at times creepily calculating (as when she seeks solace by manipulating her vulnerable friend into an affair); obsessed with appearances and therefore lacking in inner resources; a consistently cold and frequently vindictive mother; a daddy's girl-Betty is written, and clumsily performed by model-turned-actress January Jones, as a clichéd shallow sorority sister. (Just as Don's self-invented identity is Gatsby-like, so Betty, his wife, is a jejune ornament like Daisy, though without the voice full of money.) But she's also a character deeply wronged by her serial-philanderer husband, and she's hazily presented as a stultified victim of soulless postwar suburban ennui (now there's a cliché). So, perhaps to bestow gravitas on her, or at least some upper-classiness, the show establishes that she went to Bryn Mawr. But of course Bryn Mawr has never had sororities. By far the brainiest of the Seven Sisters-cussed, straight-backed, high-minded, and feminist (its students, so the wags said, preferred the Ph.D. to the Mrs.)-Bryn Mawr was probably the least likely college that Betty Draper, given to such non-U genteelisms as "passed away," would have attended. So much for satiric exactitude.

The thing is, I think we can enjoy the show and still acknowledge its problems. It doesn't need to be an Oracle, or a History Lesson. It's neither; and much as I loathe Don's backstory, I do think it serves the valuable function of grounding the show firmly in the realm of the fictional. It's a very good show that shows a heightened reality. We'd never expect total accuracy from any modern drama - it's irrational to expect the same from a period piece. Focusing on the superficials is almost besides the point - cool as they are.

Mad About Mad Men [Atlantic Monthly]

For those unfamiliar with Smith's work, she was the force behind "Fires in the Mirror," which dealt with the Crown Heights riots from a variety of fully-realized viewpoints, and the equally charged "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992" which gave the Smith treatment to the Rodney King riots. Health-care, obviously, is another kettle of fish altogether, and it'll be interesting to see how she pulls it together.

The format's the same. In "Let Me Down Easy", Smith gives voice to everyone from a rodeo rider to Lance Armstrong, all based on interviews the author-actress conducted. It's no longer a novel format, although it was when Smith started writing and performing. And she's a gifted performer, as anyone who's seen her many manifestations knows well.

So, does she make sense of the morass of healthcare debates? Well, no. And of her success, the Times' reviewer seems undecided. Of the finish, he concludes,

Intentionally or not, "Let Me Down Easy" seems to have several endings. Mr. Siegel could have sent us out on a mordantly funny note. The minister at the Memorial Church of Harvard, offering his views on the importance of accepting the fact of death ("Cherish the moment"), also seems a natural climax. His monologue is followed by a still more moving one from the director of an orphanage in South Africa, recalling the words she used to comfort an adolescent girl dying of AIDS.

In other words, it's death - what can you say? And, at the end of the day, that's what the health-care debate is about too: death weighed against life, the value of it, postponing it, our collective fear and experience. And showing the views of a lot of people's a pretty good illustration of the debate's underlying problems. Are there answers in there? Sure, but probably not just one. And I'm guessing that's what Deveare, as usual, is going for.

Woman Of 1,000 Faces Considers the Body [NY Times]

Anna Deavere Smith Is Back With 'Let Me Down Easy' [Newsday]

We hear about Linda Evangelista's gums (good, apparently) and Karen Elson's diaper bag (Danish). We learn that everyone in fashion, including star photographer Steven Meisel, thinks everyone else in fashion is super-nice — or at least that's what they're telling Vogue. We even see Naomi Campbell fetch a Band-Aid for a lowly locksmith!. So if you're looking for model drama, go to an ANTM casting — May's Vogue is on good behavior.

The London-born Pinter, who came from a modest Jewish family, began writing poetry and fiction at a young age, turning to drama in the mid-50s. After being championed by a number of critics, he became a pioneering member of the so-called "Angry Young Men," who revolutionized British drama with a combination of absurdism and politically-charged realism. In plays like “The Birthday Party,” “The Homecoming” and nearly thirty others - in addition to numerous film scripts - Pinter's name became synonymous with acerbic dialogue, quiet menace and his signature pregnant pauses. Pinter was also an outspoken liberal who battled censorship as a young artist and in later years was vocally critical of U.S. foreign policy. He is survived by his second wife, the writer Lady Antonia Fraser. [New York Times]

Time:

Aronofsky has been one of the few American directors whose movies upset the complacency of indie cinema. Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain were demanding and rewarding in various ways: the first wacko, the second gritty, the third sumptuously romantic, and all marvelously dense with imagery. So the big surprise in The Wrestler is that it's visually inert. Aronofsky's main camera habit is to follow Randy, just his imposing back, as he trudges through corridors toward another fight. (Martin Scorsese virtually patented that shot in Raging Bull and Goodfellas.) The trope does pay off later in the film, when the camera trails the briefly retired Randy down the stairs to his new job, behind a deli counter. But Aronofsky's main contribution was to lion-tame a jolting performance out of a forgotten hero.

USA Today:

Rourke gives the performance of his life. Tough, clueless and more self-aware than he lets on, Randy is excruciatingly sad. When he describes himself as "an old, broken-down piece of meat," your heart aches for him.

Slate:

Randy's relationships with these two women are what set The Wrestler (sparely scripted by Robert Siegel) apart from your standard sports-comeback drama. Wood has definitively made the jump from interesting child star to accomplished adult actress. Though hers is the most underwritten of the three main characters, she shines in her few scenes as the wounded, rageful daughter. And amid all the (granted well-earned) fuss about Rourke's comeback, I hope Marisa Tomei won't be overlooked for what I consider the single best female performance of the year, supporting or otherwise. She's smart, earthy, and astonishingly real in a role that could have foundered in cheap sentimentality. And if we're going to marvel at Rourke's sculpted (and no doubt hormonally augmented) 56-year-old form, how about Tomei's 44-year-old body pole-dancing in a G-string?

New York:

This is a case where an actor makes the difference. Mickey Rourke was once among our most charismatic leading men: alert, wittily self-contained (he always seemed to be smiling at a private joke), with a high but seductive voice. Whatever the hell he did to himself, it worked for Sin City, in which the makeup for his monster-man avenger Marv brought out the freakish poetry in his distended physiognomy. In The Wrestler, his face has that poetry without the makeup. Rourke has long blond hair that makes him look like a battered lion, and his tight, swollen mask makes Randy’s struggle to bare his soul even more momentous. It’s dumb, it’s outlandish, but smashing other people’s heads and getting his own smashed back really does complete him.

Entertainment Weekly:

Certain movies about losers have a special, desperately moving appeal. By showing us men whose lives have fallen dramatically short of their dreams, they speak to — and for — all of us. Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, with Mickey Rourke as a broken-down professional wrestling star still clinging to his glory days from the 1980s, could touch a chord in audiences the way On the Waterfront and Rocky did. It has that kind of lyrical humanity. Aronofsky doesn't speak a sentimental cinematic language. Shooting in a grainy, bare-bones naturalistic style, full of jump cuts and raw light and a handheld camera whooshing about, the director of Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain now strips away all frills, tapping a classic Hollywood myth — a has-been looking for redemption — and, at the same time, transcending that myth. The Wrestler is like Rocky made by the Scorsese of Mean Streets. It's the rare movie fairy tale that's also a bravura work of art.

The New York Observer:

It’s a plot so familiar it borders on cliché, and elements of everything from Champion to Million Dollar Baby are inescapable. But there’s no denying Aronofsky’s commitment (gone are all traces of arty self-indulgence that have been his trademarks in junk like The Fountain); the tough script by Robert D. Siegel, which never begs pity for its downbeat characters; and especially Mickey Rourke’s raw, naked passion, which makes his galvanizing performance a real awards contender, and provides a jump-start for a career with a dead transmission.

The New Yorker:

What Rourke offers us, in short, is not just a comeback performance but something much rarer: a rounded, raddled portrait of a good man. Suddenly, there it is again—the charm, the anxious modesty, the never-distant hint of wrath, the teen-age smiles, and all the other virtues of a winner. No wonder people warmed to Randy Robinson twenty years ago. I felt the same about Mickey Rourke, and I still do.

Salon:

Whatever Aronofsky did — or didn't — do, Rourke's performance comes off beautifully. "The Wrestler" may not be the "best" Aronofsky movie in any technical sense. But the director clearly feels a great deal of tenderness toward his lead character, without ever emasculating him, and Rourke's performance blossoms and thrives within that affectionate framework. Rourke's face looks a little strange: He appears to have had some plastic surgery, which has made his features look both a little too fine and a little too blurred, compared with the Rourke we used to know. But that face hasn't lost any of its expressiveness. Rourke's performance will be praised, rightly enough, for the way he pushes his characterization of Randy right over the edge of our expectations. But what I love most about Rourke's performance are the small gestures, the little things he does probably without even thinking. The way, for example, Randy delicately places his hearing aid (this guy has clearly sustained so many injuries over the course of his career, you wonder how any of his parts still work) on the bedside table in his trailer, before going to sleep.

Newsweek:

Another actor could have played this wreck for easy pathos—a sad-sack giant in decline. We've seen that act before. But Rourke, underplaying beautifully, gives him a tough, tender humor that skirts the usual clichés of aging gladiators that go back beyond "Requiem for a Heavyweight" all the way to Wallace Beery. There's none of the actorish self-indulgence, that taint of narcissism, that sometimes marred Rourke's earlier performances. It's hard at times to even imagine this is the same guy who was the Hot New Thing in "Diner" and "Rumble Fish," his brooding intensity evoking the usual James Dean references, or the lounge lizard who specialized in soft-core erotica ("9 ½ Weeks" and "Wild Orchid"). Rourke, macho man extraordinaire, disparaged the acting life for its suggestion of "femininity" and took up a boxing career to shore up his self-esteem. He seems to have poured all those demons into this part and emerged with a new sense of himself as an actor. When screen acting is this pure and simple, it doesn't look like acting at all.

The Hollywood Reporter:

Although the film teeters on the brink of sentimentality, it never topples into the slush, and this is a tribute to the rigorous direction as well as the astringent performances. Still, there are mawkish moments: When Rourke and Wood visit an abandoned beachside emporium, a tear trickles down his cheek as he pleads for her love. "Wrestler" oscillates between hard-edged naturalism and stock melodrama but ends on an understated note of melancholy that seems just right.

Variety:

Talk about comebacks. After many years in the wilderness and being considered MIA professionally, Mickey Rourke, just like the washed-up character he plays, attempts a return to the big show in "The Wrestler." Not only does he pull it off, but Rourke creates a galvanizing, humorous, deeply moving portrait that instantly takes its place among the great, iconic screen performances. An elemental story simply and brilliantly told, Darren Aronofsky's fourth feature is a winner from every possible angle, although it will require deft handling by a smart distributor to overcome public preconceptions about Rourke, the subject matter and the nature of the film.

'The Wrestler' opens today in limited release.

USA Today:

Doubt makes the most of the medium. Too many theatrical adaptations end up feeling stagy and stilted. Doubt builds upon the play, contextualizing and broadening the landscape while remaining true to its essence. Evocative overhead shots, symbolic visuals of a strong wind blowing around the school, and additional characters help to amplify and distill Shanley's vision.

Salon:

But Streep's performance scales new heights of absurdity. Like you, I've heard all the critical (or, more accurately, not-so-critical) rumbling: "Streep's performance will surely win an Oscar!" That's observant: It's so lousy that it probably will. The nuns in "Doubt" are members of the Sisters of Charity, which means they wear puffy hoods that tie under the chin, instead of the more familiar veil-and-wimple penguin getup. It's a costumey look that does no actor any favors, but it seems to have had a particularly deleterious effect on Streep, turning her into an overplaying maniac. She glowers from behind her austere little spectacles like Sunbonnet Sue on a PMS tirade. Streep's character is designed to convey the idea that women in the church, circa the 1960s, were powerless yet possibly dangerous, while the men were entitled but confused, and probably mostly harmless. Shanley offers no resolution to this Sharks vs. Jets conflict. For that, we have to wait for "Doubt! The Musical."

The New York Times:

Mr. Shanley has nothing deep to say about the church and its sex scandals, and he’s still largely using words and more words, despite the tilted camera angles and pretty pictures. But the words are good, solid, at times touching. His work with the actors is generally fine, though it’s a mystery what he thought Ms. Streep, with her wild eyes and an accent as wide as the Grand Concourse, was doing. Her outsize performance has a whiff of burlesque, but she’s really just operating in a different register from the other actors, who are working in the more naturalistic vein of modern movie realism. She’s a hoot, but she’s also a relief, because, for some of us, worshiping Our Lady of Accents is easier on the soul than doing time in church.

The New Republic:

Hoffman gives a subtle, even moving performance as the priest whose earnest appeals to tolerance, compassion, and love double as a get-out-of-jail-free card from his own conscience. But Streep treks deep into Catholic-school cliché as the tyrannical nun who stares daggers and furiously holds the line against such innocent innovations as secular Christmas music ("'Frosty the Snowman' espouses a pagan belief in magic and should be banned from the airwaves," she snaps) and the ballpoint pen. She makes it through without tumbling into caricature—she is Meryl Streep, after all—but at times only barely. Adams, for her part, dims her usual luminescence as our surrogate witness to the dispute between doubt and certainty, and Davis delivers an impassioned, if limited, performance as the anxious mother.

The Washington Post:

A great actress delivers a breathtaking star turn in "Doubt," John Patrick Shanley's taut, twisty adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Her name is Viola Davis, and in one utterly galvanizing scene, she single-handedly defines this riveting movie, emerging as its most arrestingly conflicted character and — not incidentally in a film that's all about spiritual rigor — its most compelling and unsettling moral voice.

Davis, who has delivered similarly memorable supporting performances (see "Antwone Fisher"), isn't one of the marquee names on the poster for "Doubt." But she should be, if only because she so gracefully obeys what might be one of the Ten Commandments of Acting: Thou shalt steal every single scene you can, especially from Meryl Streep. Davis does it with an emotional honesty as fierce as the unmovable object in her character's path.

The Los Angeles Times:

"Doubt" is a film with many fine elements, but its director, John Patrick Shanley, doesn't seem to trust them. Which is rather odd, because it was Shanley who wrote both the script and the play on which it's based.

The Chicago Tribune:

While Streep has a tiny bit too much fun with some of her character's excesses, she's awfully good. So is Hoffman, who walks a fine line between obvious guilt and possible innocence. So is Adams, whose naivete stays this side of the wrong kind of comedy. And in a key, wrenching scene, Viola Davis—who plays the mother of the student at risk—makes complicated emotional sense of a woman caught in an unwinnable, untenable position.

Chicago Sun-Times:

Doubt. It is the subject of the sermon Father Flynn opens the film with. Doubt was coming into the church and the United States in 1964. Would you still go to hell if you ate meat on Friday? After the assassination of Kennedy and the beginnings of Vietnam, doubt had undermined American certainty in general. What could you be sure of? What were the circumstances? The motives? The conflict between Aloysius and Flynn is the conflict between old and new, between status and change, between infallibility and uncertainty. And Shanley leaves us doubting. I know people who are absolutely certain what conclusion they should draw from this film. They disagree. "Doubt" has exact and merciless writing, powerful performances and timeless relevance. It causes us to start thinking with the first shot, and we never stop. Think how rare that is in a film.

NPR:

The film's most wrenching performance, in fact, comes from Viola Davis, who plays the boy's worried mother as a woman who is in no position to raise her voice, even when articulating a startlingly unexpected parental position on what may have transpired between the priest and her son.

The others argue strenuously and occasionally even eloquently, to ever-diminishing effect; Davis speaks plainly and quietly, and leaves not a shadow of a doubt that the moral high ground is a treacherous spot to occupy in the real world.

Rolling Stone:

Shanley stays alert to the loneliness in his main characters. And the actors could not be better or more sensitive to his intentions. Viola Davis will blow your head around six ways from Sunday as Mrs. Muller, Donald's mother, a woman who knows her son in ways that leave Sister Aloysius speechless. In just one scene of the two women walking on a wintry day, the brilliant Davis gives a performance that will be talked about for years. Adams excels as the naive nun who tries to keep her balance on shifting moral ground. But it's hard to tear your attention from the center ring, where the two protagonists try to put the other on the ropes. Hoffman nails every nuance in a complex role. And Streep is unmissable and unforgettable, finding the bruised heart of a female warrior who knows what a monster she can seem and readily exploits it. You may have doubts about which side to choose, but there's no doubt about this mind-bender. It'll pin you to your seat.

Entertainment Weekly:

Meanwhile, Streep, apparently left to her own devices, lugs a load of mannerisms under the pruny nun's severe black habit, encouraged by the movie's literal-minded director. Sister A may be an intimidating, spirit-breaking character — but for all that, she's also 
 a servant of God unswerving in her code of right and wrong, and we ought to feel her burden. We don't. Speaking lines written to reach the stage heavens, the cast is infernally noisy and hectoring about mysteries that ought 
 to be felt with a communal hush. I doubt that's what the creator — I mean the playwright — had in mind.

Newsweek:

Shanley, directing his own work, throws in a few cinematic flourishes—he's big on tilted angles—but they only reinforce "Doubt's" theatrical nature. It's a meaty showcase for its stars. Streep, with her no-nonsense Bronx accent and know-it-all smirks, gives this battleaxe a sly wit: she may be working too hard, but she's fun to watch. Hoffman makes a worthy, sympathetic foe, but it's Viola Davis as Donald's mother who gets the most striking scene. Her reaction to Sister Aloysius's suggestion that Father Flynn is taking advantage of her boy is not at all what the sister, or we, expect. "Doubt" stirs up a lot of stormy theatrical weather, but the stolid transfer from stage to screen does Shanley's play no favors. It states its Big Themes eloquently, but, really, does it have anything interesting to say about them?

The New Yorker:

Collectors of large narrative signposts will spend a happy couple of hours at Shanley’s movie, enjoying the window-rattling thunderstorms that he uses to indicate spiritual crisis, and the grimness with which Sister Aloysius, narrowing her red-rimmed eyes, delivers the line “So, it’s happened.” I didn’t know you could hiss, groan, and murmur at the same time, but Streep can do anything. She is, of course, wasted on this elephantine fable; if only “Doubt” had been made in 1964, shot by Roger Corman over a long weekend, and retitled “Spawn of the Devil Witch” or “Blood Wimple,” all would have been forgiven.

'Doubt' premieres today in limited release.

Best Actress (Drama)

• Angelina Jolie, Changeling: First of all, any movie that includes a hysterical woman screaming "I want my son back!" as the emotional climax of the trailer is treading heavily on "victim" territory. And, what do you know, Jolie's character is the biggest, most stereotypical victim on the list of female nominees.
• Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married: Our own Hortense thinks Hathaway's character is pretty victim-y, but we think she is mostly just a manipulative, angst-filled addict. What do you think?
• Meryl Streep, Doubt: Has this movie even come out yet? Streep's character doesn't seem like a victim at all from the trailers, most likely Streep plays a shrew in this film.
• Kristin Scott Thomas, I've Loved You So Long: What is this movie? Oh, it's French. Well, judging from the plot synopsis it doesn't look like Scott Thomas's character fits into any of our usual stereotypes. What do people who have seen the film think?
• Kate Winslet, Revolutionary Road: Again, has this movie come out yet? We're going to withhold judgment until we see it.

Best Actress (Comedy)

• Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky: We are going to say there were none of the regular female stereotypes in this film. Hawkins's character was just too damn likable.
• Frances McDormand, Burn After Reading: Again, McDormand doesn't play any of our regular stereotypes in this funny film. We're liking how this list is shaping up!
• Meryl Streep, Mamma Mia!: We have only seen the musical (don't ask) and Streep's character definitely wasn't a hooker, victim or doormat on the stage, so we assume it is the same on film.
• Emma Thompson, Last Chance Harvey: This film hasn't come out yet — reserving judgment.
• Rebecca Hall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona: Hall's character wasn't any of our normal stereotypes. Hurray for women in comedies this year!

Supporting Actress
• Amy Adams, Doubt: In the film's trailer, Adams seems a little doormat-y to us.
• Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona: Hm, Cruz's character was a little shrewish at times, but we can't pin a particular stereotype down on her.
• Viola Davis, Doubt: Okay, people, we get it: we all have to see Doubt!
• Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler: Oh look, another film that has not been released yet. Tomei plays a stripper, which, obviously, sounds sort of hooker-y.
• Kate Winslet, The Reader: As we saw yesterday, Winslet's character doesn't fit into one of the typical stereotypes.

Best Actress (TV Drama)
• Sally Field, Brothers & Sisters: Anyone who is a fan of the show: please weigh in.
• Mariska Hargitay, Law & Order: SVU: Hargitay's character usually deals with hookers and victims; she doesn't play them.
• January Jones, Mad Men: This one's a bit tough: Jones's character is a little bit of a doormat and victim, but she has been showing more depth and strength as the series progresses.
• Anna Paquin, True Blood: No strong stereotypes really stick out to us in this character.
• Kyra Sedgwick, The Closer: Is there a category for "badass"?

Best Actress (TV Musical or Comedy)
• Christina Applegate, Samantha Who?: Maybe a bit shrew-y in the beginning, but the whole point of the show is that she is trying to correct her previous bad behavior, right?
• America Ferrera, Ugly Betty: Not really a victim or a doormat, Ferrera's character holds her ground when up against her co-workers.
• Tina Fey, 30 Rock: Let's see, a woman with a great job, a good sense of humor who doesn't get hung up on guys? Fey's character is probably the best female character nominated!
• Debra Messing, The Starter Wife: Messing's character doesn't follow a particular stereotype. Other than, rich, self-obsessed, LA woman.
• Mary-Louise Parker, Weeds: A victim of the man, maybe!

Earlier: 2009 Golden Globes: Good Year For Jokes, Midnight Tokers

*Inspired by Shirley MacLaine's assertion that the best parts for actresses fall into one of the above categories.

USA Today:

Director Stephen Daldry (The Hours) has intelligently adapted Bernhard Schlink's novel set in post-World War II Germany. Though the effort is uneven, it's a well-acted romance that becomes a less compelling courtroom drama.

Salon:

Together, he and Winslet give the movie whatever emotional weight and meaning it has. You can't read anything about Winslet without coming across a reference to her willingness to take her clothes off, and too often when I read that stuff, I get the sense that many of the media gossipmongers hold that against her even as they pretend to applaud it. But Winslet doesn't just show off her body; she exposes herself in other ways. And what she does isn't easy, particularly in a movie climate where actresses are extremely canny about how much they withhold. I've never seen a Winslet performance (not even the frustrating one she gave in "Titanic," a movie I otherwise loathe) that came off as just a career-slash-business decision. All actors have to make money, and they choose roles for all different personal and financial reasons. But whatever Winslet's reasons may be, whenever she takes a role she peels back more layers, she gives more, than most other actresses do. As Hanna, she's a woman who refuses to allow herself to be tender, as if she were performing a self-imposed penance. She's also unself-pitying, sexually bold and insecure about her own intellect. Winslet wraps all of those ideas into one character, without needing to wave them around like brightly colored flags. Even the way she walks — vaguely heavy-footed, as if she's not sure she deserves to tread the earth — is a subtle choice.

And when she appears nude, there's not a shred of vanity in the way she does so. The movie's cinematographers — the killer duo of Roger Deakins and Chris Menges — use a palette that includes lots of naturalistic light, which makes Winslet's curves look realistic and vital, not like soft-focus art projects. "The Reader" comes off as a movie that doggedly follows some dull, preordained text. It's Winslet who dares to read between the lines.

The New York Times:

Although the commercial imperatives that drive a movie like this one are understandable — the novel was a best seller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, for starters — you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn’t really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.

New Yorker:

The whole film, in fact, with its loping pace and plaintive score, feels like a woefully polite, not to say British, take on a foreign horror; was there really no one, from the fierce new wave of German filmmakers, prepared to dramatize the Schlink? Or did they feel, as I did, that it was pernicious from the start—a low-grade musing on atrocity, garnished with erotic titillation? Imprisoned for life, Hanna must read to herself, but are we really supposed to be moved by the thought—or now, in Daldry’s film, by the sight—of an unrepentant Nazi parsing Chekhov? That is not culturally nourishing; it is morally famished. There is a fine scene, near the end, when a survivor of Hanna’s crimes (the great Lena Olin) tells the middle-aged Michael (Ralph Fiennes) that “nothing came out of the camps,” that they “weren’t therapy.” Quite true, so why has the film pretended otherwise?

Associated Press:

Thankfully, Kate Winslet bares not just her body but her soul with a performance that pierces the genteel polish of this high-minded awards-season drama.

As the central figure in this adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel, Winslet is in the nearly impossible position of trying to make us feel sympathy for a former Nazi concentration camp guard — but, being an actress of great range and depth, she very nearly pulls off that feat completely. What holds her and the film back from greatness is the oversimplification of imagery and symbolism that emerges as "The Reader" progresses, as it morphs from an invigorating love story to a rather conventional courtroom drama.

The New York Observer:

This is not to say that the performances of Ms. Winslet, Mr. Kross and Mr. Fiennes are anything less than convincingly heartfelt. This is especially true of Ms. Winslet, who is appearing later this month in Revolutionary Road, directed by husband Sam Mendes and adapted from the much-admired novel by Richard Yates. Ms. Winslet is to be reunited with Leonardo DiCaprio for the first time since they made box-office history together in James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), after she made her sparkling debut at 19 in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994). She has never been adequately appreciated for all of her strikingly offbeat performances, but now her time may have come at last.

MSNBC:

But by this point, “The Reader” has shown itself to be so emotionally constipated — not to mention unable to seriously address the Holocaust — that there’s nothing compelling about these two characters or their stories. As one character points out toward the end, “If you want catharsis, look in literature; don’t look in the camps.” It’s advice that Daldry should have followed, since his movie certainly adds nothing to seemingly boundless explorations of this subject.

Most of the cast comes off as twitchy and cantankerous, although Kross makes for a compelling teenager in love (he’s less convincing as a young adult law student) and the great Bruno Ganz livens up his few scenes as Michael’s law professor.

Newsweek:

"The Reader" is not about the horrors of the "final solution." It's about how Michael deals with the fact that the great first love of his life was implicated in these atrocities. Ralph Fiennes plays Michael in middle age— a parched, solitary man of the law whose unusual relationship with the older Hanna raises questions about his own moral compass. "The Reader" can feel stilted and abstract: the film's only flesh-and-blood characters spend half the movie separated. But its emotional impact sneaks up on you. "The Reader" asks tough questions, and, to its credit, provides no easy answers.

TIME:

In a curious way, though, much of this is superfluous to the movie as a movie. The story dares to hint at a certain smugness in the attitudes of its victims, which is something we are not at all used to in movies of this kind. And as a romance, at times feverish and other times grim, the film works surprisingly well. There's something gripping about the relationship between this ill-assorted pair, and something touching about the way events beyond their control or understanding reach out to blight their lives.

'The Reader' opens in limited theaters today.

The Los Angeles Times:

It also must be emphasized that even though director Howard had all these first-class elements to work with, "Frost/Nixon" wouldn't have succeeded as well as it does without his experience, his professionalism and his skills. He's successfully opened the play up without pushing anything too hard, and he's deftly avoided the sentimentality that, with the exception of the underrated "The Missing," has often been a quality of his films.

The result is involving, engrossing cinema — more thrilling, in fact, than Howard's "The Da Vinci Code" — filmmaking of a type rarely seen anymore and sorely missed.

Wall Street Journal:

What Ron Howard gets, to a degree that's astonishing in a two-hour film, is the density and complexity, as well as the generous entertainment quotient, of Peter Morgan's screenplay. (Mr. Morgan previously wrote "The Queen," in which Michael Sheen played Tony Blair, and "The Last King of Scotland.") "Frost/Nixon" does more than dramatize the high points of the TV interviews. In the frantic run-up to the recorded interviews, and during the early videotape sessions, the film gives us the collateral drama of a talk-show host, accustomed to celebrity chatter, trying desperately to play the role of a serious journalist.

Salon:

But by the time the Frost-Nixon interviews wound to a close — in real life, the 29 hours of taped footage were edited and aired over five nights — Frost, thanks to some wiliness and a little bit of luck, had coaxed his slippery subject into a tacit admission of guilt in the Watergate scandal. And right there, I've gone ahead and given away the ending to "Frost/Nixon" — but this is a story in which what happens is far less interesting than how it happens. Howard has made a picture for grown-ups, a well-constructed entertainment that neither talks down to its audience nor congratulates it just for showing up. That's particularly refreshing around holiday time, when the studios roll out all their big Oscar-bait pictures, bestowing upon us their most boring, stately and somber works — anything that spells "quality" with a capital "Q," even if genuine craftsmanship is sorely missing.

The New York Times:

And devour Mr. Langella does, chomp chomp. Artfully lighted and shot to accentuate the character’s trembling, affronted jowls, his shoulders hunched, face bunched, he creeps along like a spider, alternately retreating into the shadows and pouncing with a smile. That smile should give you nightmares, but Mr. Howard, a competent craftsman who tends to dim the lights in his movies even while brightening their themes (“A Beautiful Mind”), has neither the skill nor the will to draw out a dangerous performance from Mr. Langella, something to make your skin crawl or heart leap. Unlike Oliver Stone, who invested Nixon (a memorable Anthony Hopkins) with Shakespearean heft but refused to sentimentalize him, this is a portrait designed to elicit a sniffy tear or two along with a few statuettes.

Slate:

Frost/Nixon's emotional climax is, in my view, the script's weakest moment. On the eve of those last two crucial interviews, Nixon makes a drunken late-night phone call to Frost in his hotel room and feeds him the oldest line in the serial-killer-vs.-cop playbook: Deep down, you and me, we're the same. Langella makes the most of this booze-sodden monologue, but its central premise—that Nixon and Frost shared an insecurity about social class that fueled their drive to succeed—seems more British than American: Wasn't Nixon's persecution complex far too vast to be reduced to class anxiety? If our 37th president has proved such an enduring subject for on-screen fictions (see Mark Feeney's 2004 book, Nixon at the Movies), it's precisely because we can never finally fathom his bottomless pathologies. If we did, we wouldn't have Nixon to kick around anymore.

USA Today:

Howard establishes a mounting sense of tension, interspersing interviews with talking-head-style analyses from each camp. Oliver Platt, Matthew Macfadyen and Kevin Bacon are excellent in these roles.

Morgan seamlessly blends actual interview dialogue and imagined conversations.

The film convincingly conveys how uncomfortable the 37th president was in his own skin.

NPR:

Happily, director Ron Howard takes a quasi-documentary approach that has the effect of giving Frost more heft on screen — there's news footage, plus behind-the-scenes shots of TV monitors, all conspiring to make it clear that he's better at using this emotionally cool medium than Nixon, especially in the interview's big showdown.

Entertainment Weekly:

With the transcript as his guide, Morgan explores psychological terrain: how Frost found the chutzpah to land the interviews; how Nixon played cat and mouse with his interlocutor when asked to admit wrongdoing and apologize; how both men of humble beginnings felt stung by the scorn of those born with more 
privilege; and how both were superb manipulators. But Sheen (who played the very model of a modern British go-getter as Tony Blair in The Queen, also written by Morgan) and Langella (operating at the peak of his powers) are disciplined enough to crop their performances to close-up size. (The sizing echoes the look of the 
 actual interviews.) And Howard is smart 
 to enhance the one-on-ones with journalistic context, weaving archival Watergate-era 
 footage into his fictionalized re-creation.

The New York Observer:

Mr. Howard and Mr. Morgan have very astutely established Frost’s mercurial personality in advance by having him brazenly pick up Rebecca Hall’s all-too-willing Caroline Cushing on a Concorde flight from Australia to California. Indeed, the impression is given that Mr. Frost habitually makes passes at any lone and attractive woman on his many worldwide flights.

The New Yorker:

“Frost/Nixon” offers considerable insight into the Nixon mystery, without solving it; the movie is fully absorbing and even, when Nixon falls into a drunken, resentful rage, exciting, but I can’t escape the feeling that it carries about it an aura of momentousness that isn’t warranted by the events. Why is it meant to be so important to us whether David Frost revives his career? Frost and Reston did finally goad Nixon into saying that he let the American people down, and that he believed that “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal,” and they have extracted a considerable amount of copy out of the broadcasts (including two books). But it’s possible that both journalists and playwright have confused a media coup (and a less important one than that of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein) with a cleansing act that forever chastened the Presidency. It was anything but that: after all, twenty-four years later, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney entered the White House.

Newsweek:

Langella and Sheen originated these roles on stage, and it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing them. Sheen, who was Tony Blair in Morgan's "The Queen," dazzles as the debonair media high-wire artist holding on for dear life when the slippery Nixon ducks all his early-round punches. More presidential than the real president, Langella gives Nixon a stature and poignancy that the man himself rarely displayed: it's a towering, witty performance that reaches its peak in the drunken late-night phone call he makes to Frost, sizing him up as a man, like himself, with a fiercely competitive chip on his shoulder. The scene is Morgan's invention, but it's an illuminating, inspired fiction. Not everything in "Frost/Nixon" happened in real life, but both sides would probably agree it should have.

Frost/Nixon:

A totally mesmerizing battle of the wills between the occasionally charming yet wily Nixon and the increasingly desperate Frost. Supporting roles are bolstered by Kevin Bacon as Nixon’s ex-military pitbull Chief of Staff and Platt and Rockwell as the crackerjack researchers dying to crucify Nixon.

'Frost/Nixon' opens today in theaters nationwide.

Washington Post:

But it turns out that "Australia," which arrives in the wake of much gossip about a troubled production, a disastrously swollen budget and multiple endings, doesn't wink as often as it genuflects toward its massive subject and, even more worshipfully, toward old-school Hollywood schmaltz. A wildly ambitious, luridly indulgent spectacle of romance, action, melodrama and revisionism, "Australia" is windy, overblown, utterly preposterous and insanely entertaining.

The New York Times:

More than anything else in the film, Nullah included, Ms. Kidman tethers “Australia” to the world of human feeling and brings Mr. Luhrmann’s outrageous flights of fancy down to earth. That may not be where he prefers to make movies, but it’s a necessary place for even a fantasist to visit. Although many of his Western contemporaries like to root around in down-and-dirty realism, Mr. Luhrmann maintains a full-throttle commitment to cinematic illusion and what he characterizes as the “heightened artifice” of his so-called Red Curtain trilogy, “Strictly Ballroom,” “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge.” You may not always see the people for the production design in these, but when you do — as in “Romeo + Juliet” and sometimes here — they spring forth from their fantastical milieus like fists.

Slate:

t's a mystery to me how Baz Luhrmann continues to be regarded as a director worth following. A long time has passed since I've regarded his lush, loud, defiantly unsubtle output with anything but dread. In Australia, his new romantic-epic-Western-protest-war drama, Luhrmann's dedication to cliché has become so absolute, it starts to verge on a kind of genius. There's not a single music cue that isn't obvious (swelling strings to indicate heartbreak, wailing didgeridoo to signal aboriginal nobility). Nary a line of dialogue is spoken that hasn't been boiled down, like condensed milk, from a huge vat of earlier Hollywood films (Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Out of Africa, and various John Ford cattle-drive pictures being the most obvious referents). But to marvel at the purity of Australia's corniness isn't to imply that the movie functions as so-bad-it's-good camp, or guilty pleasure, or anything else involving aesthetic enjoyment. Audiences without a vast appetite for racial condescension, CGI cattle, and backlit smooches will sit through Australia with all the enthusiasm of the British convicts who were shipped to that continent against their will in the late 18th century.

Salon:

Luhrmann — the good-crazy Luhrmann — has a taste for lavish spectacles, and he places an elaborate set piece smack in the middle of "Australia" that, as I watched it, made me believe the movie had completely recovered from its wobbly beginning and would only get better. Boy, was I wrong: The second half of "Australia," Luhrmann's attempt to pull off a wartime weeper, is so aggressively sentimental that it begins to feel more like punishment than pleasure. I left "Australia" feeling drained and weakened, as if I'd suffered a gradual poisoning at the hands of a mad scientist.

USA Today:

The film is visually arresting, with some notably Remington-style painterly landscapes. But the banal story and predictable arc seems a departure for director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!), whose work is usually more inventive.

Entertainment Weekly:

Long before the second hour of Australia (which feels like the fifth), it's clear that Luhrmann hasn't found a satisfactory way to make a movie nearly as ballsy — or coherent — as he wants his creation to be. Missing the e 
in epic, the filmmaker has produced a labored pic, weighed down by the very artifice that is traditionally his specialty. And slogging on into the third hour (or is it the eighth?) of his antipodean attempt at Gone With the Wind — complete with themes of love, war, racism, and the joys of playing a harmonica — Luhrmann employs the brute strength one might expect of...maybe a drover.

The New York Observer:

As year-end movies go, I had high hopes for Australia. I really wanted to like this one. In a jaded epoch of pretentiousness and cookie-cutter déjà vu, a humongous, sprawling, romantic, action-packed epic (bring ’em on!) about earth’s last untamed frontier, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, was, I bargained, just what the doctor ordered. Alas, it is my sad duty to report that even the two prettiest people on the screen today can’t save this titanic turkey from dropping dead of exhaustion. Desperately in need of a pair of scissors at a running time (not much sprawl, but lots of crawl) of almost three hours, Australia is one of the most boring movies ever made, and one of the corniest. Bring bottled water, No-Doze, a sandwich and a clean change of underwear.

Time:

Have you seen everything Australia has on offer a dozen times before? Sure you have. It's a movie less created by director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann than assembled, Dr. Frankenstein-style, from the leftover body parts of earlier movies. Which leaves us asking this question: How come it is so damnably entertaining?

The Village Voice:

That said, you'd need a heart of stone to resist the enchanting little boy, Nullah (wonderfully played by newcomer Brandon Walters), the offspring of a white man and an Aboriginal mother, who drives the magical-realist subtext of Australia and its generously inclusive and forgiving vision. (Luhrmann allegedly shot three endings to the movie, and it feels as though they all made the cut.) I can picture hard-core haters of the colonial oppressor rolling their eyes at Nullah's farewell line, "I'll sing you to me, Mrs. Boss." But a little conciliation goes a long way these days, and I freely confess to being almost as undone by the ending of Australia as I was by the climax of that other post-colonial feel-good movie of the year, Slumdog Millionaire.

NPR:

Luhrmann is a lover of artifice and excess; he's got no use for old-school realism, and he brings an unapologetically over-the-top aesthetic to the table. Here, he also wanted to make a deeply Australian film, to bend the norms of Hollywood filmmaking to the task of telling the story of his own country his own way.

Rolling Stone:

Luhrmann, the visual master behind Moulin Rouge!, cannot compose an ugly shot. But beautiful scenery and the best intentions can't save Australia from dissolving in goo.

The New Republic:

Which brings us to Australia. As in all your films, there are a lot of likable elements (as in most of them, often too many at once). There's music and humor and action and romance and loopy camera work and nostalgic nods to the popular music and cinema of the past. ("Oz" being a common nickname for Australia, we get to hear "Over the Rainbow" a lot.) But what might have worked as a buoyant throwback adventure yarn is instead weighted down with historical baggage, racial sermonizing, and, yes, frequent eruptions of tragedy.

The A.V. Club:

Australia hurries to get nowhere, finding and losing momentum amidst the jutting cliffs and endless plains. Only one sequence, a long cattle drive through harsh terrain, works on its own terms. The rest alternates earnest grappling with Australia's troubled racial history, half-earned mysticism, and a surprisingly perfunctory romance between Jackman—charming as an Outback-sculpted man in his element—and Kidman, who never quite loses the cartoon Katharine Hepburn veneer of her character's first appearance. It almost goes without saying that the film looks gorgeous, but the filmmaking behind it feels unsure how to work on this grand a scale. Australia is big. But it never fills the screen.

Variety:

Embracing grand old-school melodrama while critiquing racist old-fashioned politics, Baz Luhrmann's grandiose "Australia" provides a luxurious bumpy ride; like a Rolls-Royce on a rocky country road, it's full of bounces and lurches, but you can't really complain about the seat. Deliberately anachronistic in its heightened style of romance, villainy and destiny, the epic lays an Aussie accent on colorful motifs drawn from Hollywood Westerns, war films, love stories and socially conscious dramas. Some of it plays, some doesn't, and it is long. But the beauty of the film's stars and landscapes, the appeal of the central young boy and, perhaps more than anything, the filmmaker's eagerness to please tend to prevail, making for a film general audiences should go with, even if they're not swept away. Robust, but not boffo, box office looks in store.

'Australia' opens today in wide release.

Salon:

Maybe the characters Demme is showing us are in some ways too real. There were stretches of "Rachel Getting Married" that made me feel restless and annoyed, itching to get away from the aggressive, overgrown neuroses of these characters: A little of that goes a long way in the movies, and a filmmaker doesn't need to fetishize characters' rampant self-absorption to get the point across. But just when someone says or does something that makes you want to shout at the screen, Demme pulls back and reminds us — by focusing on a particular face, or by showing us a character's awkward body language — that these are, quite simply, people in pain. Hathaway, in particular, with those wary eyes and lips that always look on the verge of quivering, brings much of that pain to the surface: This isn't a character you want to hug — she's got too many angles — but Demme feels so deeply for her that he makes us feel for her, too.

Slate:

I've never been much of an Anne Hathaway fan. She always seemed, to borrow a phrase some brilliant blogger once used about Gwyneth Paltrow, to be "sprinkling herself with fairy dust." But Hathaway transcends her usual complacency in this role and resists the temptation of using Kym's (and her own) wounded-bird appeal to let the character off the hook. Bill Irwin, the great stage clown who's a Demme regular, is marvelously expressive as the girls' overanxious father. And when the luminous Debra Winger first appears onscreen as their withholding mother, you want to grab her and say (on your own behalf as well as her daughters'): Where have you been all these years?

The New York Times:

The themes of dependency and recovery that Kym brings home in her overnight bag are familiar, even banal. Every unhappy family may be unique, but every addict is fundamentally the same, and if “Rachel Getting Married” had surrendered its story completely to Kym, it would have risked becoming as drab and familiar as a made-for-television 12-step homily.

But Mr. Demme protects the film against such an unsatisfying fate. He is certainly sympathetic to Kym, even as he and Ms. Hathaway conspire to show her at her appalling worst. But he has never been one to restrict his sympathies, and the wonderful thing about “Rachel Getting Married” is how expansive it seems, in spite of the limits of its scope and the modesty of its ambitions. It’s a small movie, and in some ways a very sad one, but it has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare.

The Los Angeles Times:

"Rachel Getting Married" is welcome for any number of reasons. It's a gratifying return to his independent film roots for Oscar-winning director Dem- me, a powerful screenwriting debut for Jenny Lumet, a herculean job of hand-held cinematography by Declan Quinn and a career-changing performance by Anne Hathaway, of all people, as an ultra-troubled young woman set loose from rehab for her sister's wedding.

Newsweek:

Anyone expecting the demure, doe-eyed Hathaway of "The Princess Diaries" or "The Devil Wears Prada" is in for a shock. Kym is a major pain in the ass, and Hathaway's raw, spiky performance makes no attempt to ingratiate. Yet she makes Kym's inner torment so palpable you can't help but feel for her, however insufferable she may be. It's a terrific performance, and DeWitt matches her step for step: you can feel a lifetime of tangled sisterly feelings in every charged moment between them.

The A.V. Club:

Rachel Getting Married sounds like a joyless dirge, but it's actually far from it, and a lot of that is owed to the way Demme harnesses the genuine love and good feeling that buoys the occasion. If he ever retires from directing, he could have a great side business as a wedding planner: The rehearsal dinner, the ceremony, and the reception are brimming with sweet multi-culti touches and great music, including performances by the likes of Robyn Hitchcock and TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. (The cutting of the cake, for one, may be the most moving moment in the whole movie.) With an easy, freeflowing style—owing partially to the Dogme-style approach that has led some to compare the film to The Celebration—Demme captures the group dynamic of the wedding party, with its seismic shifts in mood from celebratory to melancholy and back again.

The New York Observer:

Up to my eyeballs in draggy, shapeless amateur junk, I am genuinely thrilled to welcome a film this colorful, artistically realized and wonderfully alive. Steeped in the tradition of sound narrative form yet scrappy and unpredictable, acted and written with enormous style but with front and back doors open to experiment and surprise, it’s a film that challenges you to keep a jogger’s pace to keep up with it, then leaves you breathless. With three more months to go, Rachel Getting Married is already high on my 10-best list for 2008.

Entertainment Weekly:

This melting-pot wedding creates a frisson of its own; it's a vision of a new world. I do wish that Demme hadn't let the wedding music, by Robyn Hitchcock, Sister Carol East, and a few others, take over the last act. This much healing-by-'80s-hipster-taste is too much. But Rachel Getting Married is still a triumph — Demme's finest work since The Silence of the Lambs, and a movie that tingles with life.

The Hollywood Reporter:

Shot through with smart humor, "Rachel" outlaws cliche. Sydney's good-looking best man, Kieran (Mather Zickel), whom Kym has previously spotted at a 12-step meeting for struggling addicts, materializes at the wedding like her perfect romantic partner. In a humorously unexpected twist, Kym immediately beds him in the attic and ignores him for the rest of the film. A whole romantic subplot is nipped in the bud, leaving the screenplay room to open family wounds and explore less predictable territory.

Variety:

The characters' volatile moodswings are matched by the restlessness of the HD camerawork commandeered by Declan Quinn ("Monsoon Wedding"). Quinn's camera, few of whose moves were blocked out beforehand, proves ever ready to take off in unexpected directions.

The Toronto Star:

Hathaway's performance as the brittle Kym has been trumpeted as a potential Oscar turn for her, demonstrating her dark side after her roles playing princesses.

But there's more than one award-worthy performance here. As the titular Rachel, DeWitt adroitly plays a sympathetic figure who still manages to be hard to like.

And as the aloof Abby, the MIA Debra Winger returns to the screen with a small but powerful performance that implies a lot of repressed rage and regret.

'Rachel Getting Married' opens today in limited release.

The Los Angeles Times:

The duke ought to be the villain of this piece, and, in fact, he is, but it is the wonder of Fiennes' performance that it is not only a marvelous portrayal of absolute power in the flesh but also the most sympathetic portrait of a man who, by rights, shouldn't have even the tiniest drop of our regard.

Twice Oscar-nominated (for "Schindler's List" and "The English Patient"), Fiennes works in the subtlest ways, layering in everything from how he carries himself to the way unstated emotions are hinted at by his stone-like face, to present someone who can't help being who he is. Thanks to Fiennes, we come to understand the enigmatic duke as the immovable object deeply perplexed at having to contend with the unstoppable force that is his wife. It is a quietly complex performance almost beyond words, and it overshadows all the gorgeous pictures that are its elegant frame.

Time:

At a certain level, The Duchess is a parable, possibly even a fantasy, about female empowerment.

Fortunately for us, however, it does not linger often or long at that level. As movies like this go — stately homes constantly arustle with the sound of lingerie falling gently to the parquet floors — it is quite a lively, and even occasionally a rather touching, piece.

USA Today:

Though it does have occasional elements of a bodice-ripper romance, the engaging story is distinguished by sharp writing and strong acting. This is a highbrow and elegant chick flick that outstrips the likes of The Women or other insipid movies targeted to females.

The Duchess explores the nature of celebrity and charisma. Most compellingly, it chronicles the saga of a vibrant and forward-thinking woman hampered by the constraints of a rigid society.

Salon:

The raw material here would be a pile of riches for any actress to dig into, and the screenwriters give Knightley plenty to work with. (The script was adapted by Dibb, Anders Thomas Jensen and Jeffrey Hatcher, the last of whom is the screenwriter, and playwright, behind "Stage Beauty," as well as the writer of the underappreciated bonbon "Casanova," starring the late Heath Ledger.) And Knightley doesn't let them down. I've come a long way with Knightley over the years, from finding her almost unbearable to watch (I just couldn't get past the skeletal planes of her face) to falling in love with her circa "Pride and Prejudice." Knightley's performance here veers gracefully from the charming to the devastating: One minute she's giggling as she plays cards with her cherubic little offspring; the next, she's crestfallen when she realizes that her husband is determined to choke off all her life's happiness. (Fiennes' performance here is wholly without vanity: He holds nothing back in playing a loathsome, stubborn character, though he still manages to let glimmers of humanity peek through.) Everything Knightley does rings true and clear — she defines the character of Georgiana in a way that's not anachronistic, nor modern in a forced way, but timeless. That's a lot to ask of a young actress, but Knightley is up to the task. Her Georgiana is history with a human face.

The New York Times:

A big-boned beauty who leads with her jaw, Ms. Knightley looks pretty as a Gainsborough picture in and out of her silks and satins, but she’s not a remotely composed one. Though now 23, she still tends to throw herself around the room like one of those jangling adolescent girls who, arms and legs pinwheeling, heads bobbing like Halloween apples, have yet to adjust to their newly sprouted bodies. (Modigliani would have loved the willowy bend of her neck if he could have persuaded her to stop fidgeting.) She’s not much of an actress — she pops her eyes instead and thrusts out her chest — but she doesn’t need to be Helen Mirren if she can cultivate a real screen presence. Stillness would become her, as would a good director.

NPR:

And when Her Grace undresses — or rather, is undressed by an impatient if only vaguely attentive duke on their wedding night — the director shows us the pinch marks made in Knightley's back by her tight-laced corset.

As many times as I've watched women getting strapped into those things in costume epics, I don't think I've ever seen the pinched flesh. Says worlds, I'd say, about what both the star and the duchess were willing to put up with

The A.V. Club:

To some extent, The Duchess recalls Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, in that it's about bed-hopping and courtly ritual during a time of revolution. Dibb isn't interested in delivering an audience-unfriendly art film, though. His Duchess is thoroughly populist and middlebrow, full of all the high wigs, thick powder, perfect diction, and straightforward dialogue that define bodice-ripping prestige pictures about silently suffering souls. Knightley's brand of muted iconoclasm has always been well-suited to just these kind of coach-and-corset movies, and as a result, the story of her character's fall from idealism to practicality becomes fairly moving. Dibb and company make too much of the parallels between Georgiana's story and that of her most famous descendent, Lady Diana Spencer, but at the same time, the "ironies of fame" material works well—not because of its specific application to the aristocracy, but for how it relates to the commoners. Lots of people dream of better lives for themselves and the citizens of the world. And lots of people stop short when they realize they need to stay home and tuck their kids into bed, so the next generation can have their own unfulfilled dreams someday.

Entertainment Weekly:

But with Knightley in the title role, something interesting happens:
 The star's sporty, modern-girl
 attitude, her Vogue-worthy eyebrows, 
and her athletic build (no matter how impressively those long limbs are encased in complicated gowns of satin and silk) lend an attitude of now-ness to a production that wants to be part historical biopic, part 
 tabloid-relevant. (Director Saul Dibb has a background in documentaries.)

Knightley, now 23, is not a very deep interpreter of her roles (whether in Atonement or the Pirates of the 
 Caribbean trilogy), nor is she as hip as Kirsten Dunst and the rest of the in crowd who cavorted in Sofia Coppola's 
fashion-forward Marie Antoinette with downtown élan. But that hardly matters in The Duchess.

New York:

Every turn is telegraphed, but Fiennes’s duke is a fascinating stiff—uneasy with his privilege but ruthless in using it. Not only is Knightley most excellent, her starved-supermodel look adds an affecting subtext: that the economic impact of male disapproval still inhibits women’s freedom.

Variety:

How Georgiana exploited both her celebrity and her instinctive empathy with commoners to drum up electoral support for her close associate, Lord Charles Fox (an underused Simon McBurney), is dealt with only superficially. Though equally apolitical, Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" displayed more insight into its subject (an acquaintance of Georgiana's, and arguably the less interesting figure) than "The Duchess" manages with its more straightforward reading of history.

While Knightley ably embodies Georgiana's easy wit, occasional naivete and ahead-of-her-time common sense, her performance is somewhat diminished by its familiarity and the film's reductive view of its protag. And as lovely as the actress is, all that finery can have a smothering effect; she looked more radiant amid the sweat and squalor of Joe Wright's "Pride & Prejudice."

The Hollywood Reporter:

The melodrama is a bit bloodless, though, figuratively and literally. This is a not-uninteresting chapter during an exciting time in British and European politics — neither the American nor French revolutions get mentioned — but writers Dibbs, Jeffrey Hatcher and Anders Thomas Jensen find no way to connect us with these distant personages. Probably the most surprising thing to a modern audience is how aristocrats engage in the most intimate and embarrassing conduct in full view of servants who are treated as little more than furniture.

'The Duchess' opens today in limited release.

However: we did find one review from the LA Times which reads like a memorized run-down of a typical episode from a fan, with a reference to a contestant's shorts thrown in to up the legitimacy factor. Anyway, we'll all be watching tonight, with a wrap-up (courtesy of Dodai) to come tomorrow.

UPDATE: As some of you noted, there was another review in the Washington Post! So Bravo execs got around to sending screeners to two newspapers, great job. But! The Washington Post reviewer, Robin Givhan, will be discussing the episode tomorrow and the public can submit questions for her to answer about Project Runway! Maybe you could ask why she got a screener but other newspapers didn't? Or what the new catchphrase will be.

How Bravo Is Sabotaging Project Runway [Jossip]
Why All The Mystery, Project Runway? [Boston Herald]
Project Runway Fifth Season Premiere [LA Times]
Project Runway Returns With Gently Worn Concept [WaPo]

MOE: Okay so Hillary choked up and suddenly it's the meme to end all femememes. the Femmeme fatale. Before we get all "sincere" I would like to know what they are saying "inside the Beltway" about this. I thought Givhan hit the nail on the head when she asked Would she have been more persuasive if she'd shed one perfect tear like Demi Moore in "Ghost"? The problem is that then you get into the backlash to the imagined backlash part, which is a lot easier to do than actual genuine reaction.
MEGAN: I think there is significant debate as to whether is was real, staged or the result of exhaustion.
MOE: Of course, because they are such good triangulators, it now seems like it's ALL of those things!
MEGAN: Can you be all of those things?
MOE: Staged so the small government big gun contingent can feel free to yell "Iron my shirt" and other highly original epithets at rallies and then President Bubba can swoop in and defend his short, old, FEMALE wife and play the loyal husband and then we can all rush to judge both "reactions" with our own, "shut the fuck up, MEN" reactions.
MEGAN: I'm voting exhaustion.
MOE: Well you WOULD say that.
Being exhausted.
And a woman
But the thing is, when you are exhausted to the point of choking up, don't you actually CRY?
That was not crying.
That was some steely motherfucking resolve.

MEGAN: True. But I get emotional in basically three circumstances: hormones, exhaustion and frustration.
No, she held back the tears but her voice broke.
MOE: AND THEY ALWAYS ALLY THEMSELVES TOGETHER.
WE ARE ALWAYS FIGHTING THREE FRONT WARS.

MEGAN: Can't be a man, don't be a girl.

MOE: I guess her voice broke, but I was like, "wait I thought she was supposed to cry in this video?!"
This is one of those moments that, if I were covering the campaign, I would be so exhausted and frustrated I wouldn't even notice Hillary.
MEGAN: True. I think everyone's exhausted. I mean, just because she didn't actually break down-break down, she definitely got choked up, and at a very opportune moment.
And she's being dragged over the coals for it, for being (according to the Edwardses) not a tough enough person to lead this country.
MOE: Right, Edwards has got to be exhausted too.
MEGAN: 2 weeks ago, she was frigid and too manly or something, and she gets a little choked up and no one says that anymore, but it's a whole new round of criticism,

MOE: Otherwise he is just a supreme tool for saying that.
MEGAN: I think he might be a tool.
MOE: Right, which is why Edwards is such a dumbass. The thing I have trouble is that we are all REACTING to this against the media perception of Hillary as this Machialesbian iron woman. And I guess that's what she wants us to react to. Or does she? I dunno. She can't win. And maybe that's just it: she can't win. But can we?
Let's go back and watch the video one more time!
Or let's not and say we did.
MEGAN: I watched it like 3 times yesterday, so I'm done.
Technically, she chokes up, gets it together and then chokes up again.
Weak, exhausted or calculating.
MOE: Yeah, and the first time she chokes up it's unexpected, but by the second time she chokes up you're like, "Work it girl!"

MEGAN: Which she does.
MOE: Well yeah, because I would never actually tell Hillary to "work it girl," I am actually just articulating the voice in my head that is imagining the voice inside the head of a Hillary supporter or an undecided underloved middle aged single mom with a month's supply of 100-calorie snack packs and a copy of eat pray love or a flamboyant gay man or some other stereotype now that I am at home during daytime television hours and I am thinking, "What Would The Stereotype Think?"
But when I watch it as myself, my reaction is, "Oh good lord it's not a CRY unless SNOT is present."
MEGAN: Well, those 100 calorie snack packs are pretty good.

No, I can cry briefly without snot!
I only get snot when I start legitimately sobbing.
MOE: I HATE hundred calorie snack packs. They are not RATIONAL.
MEGAN: I broke up with my boyfriend of 4 years less than 6 months ago. Believe me, I know ALL the stages of crying.
MOE: Have you checked the UNIT PRICE of those snack packs?
MEGAN: Yes. You're paying for the packaging.
MOE: Well yes I understand.
MEGAN: They are for people with no self control, who would, say, eat an entire bowl of popcorn.
The packaging cost is our self-flagellation.
MOE: Hey, don't worry about the bowl of popcorn! You eat an entire bowl and get all the self-loathing of a bona fide food binge and you've really only consumed somewhere between 240 and 350 calories, tops! That rationale doesn't really work on me anymore. Also, the hands. You can't type and eat popcorn at the same time! When I'm hungry, I grab a snickers. 290 calories. Wait did I just expose myself as some other sort of prisoner of media images and perceptions? Probs yeah. Anyway, CRYING. I don't think what Hillary did should have counted as crying because she kept it in check like a total pro. On the other hand, she's a pro! It's so hard.
Hey, did you cry at Atonement?
MEGAN: I haven't seen it, but, um, well, I cry when the Beast dies in the cartoon Beauty and the Beast. And when Demi Moore does in Ghost. And, um, really drunk after my college boyfriend dumped me I cried when Tara Reid lost her virginity in American Pie. So, let's just say that, when I see it, I definitely will, which is why I'll be glad that movie theatres are dark.
MOE: Oooh, I cried at the movie Jersey Girl — but I was on a plane. I cried at Traffic. I cried reading Eat Pray Love though I had just broken up with my boyfriend so it doesn't count. But it's hard to cry when you're talking. That's why Hillary did it so good. When she said "I have so many ideas for this country" that was totally an awesome teary statement. Like when you're moving out of the house you shared with your boyfriend and looking out at all the stupid $3 Ikea possessions you acquired together and you're just like "I had so may IDEAS about how we were finally going to make this place look not like a dormroom-meets-crack den. Woe are the limits of the human condition for landing us here!!"
MEGAN: Yeah, I can't cry and talk.

But I'm glad to know any post-break-up crying at stupid shit doesn't count!
MOE: Well the thing about crying is that i think it activates your imagination. Like "omg I have so many IDEAS guys just give me a chance!!" When we do have a woman president I hope she allows herself to cry and get those kinds of notions and ideas that men only get when they get high.
MEGAN: Men also get all those notions after sex, and then forget them all when they wake up.

I think it's because crying relieves so much stress and personal frustration, it's like the snotty equivalent of a deep tissue massage.
MOE: I wish I could cry right now.
MEGAN: I'd rather have the massage, personally, but partly because my masseur is named Antoine and he has a sexy French accept.
MOE: but no. I don't care enough anymore.
MEGAN: Er, accent. Freudian slip.
MOE: I have to go re-watch Atonement.

We're sick, quite frankly, of hearing guys who use the phrase "I don't want any drama" to back out of situations in which a female is angry or upset. For some at Jezebel [That would be Anna. -Ed.], use of the word "drama" to describe an argument, confrontation or discussion is enough to create, well, major drama. Why? Cause it's a convenient, cowardly way of rejecting equal responsibility in a conflict. It's also sexist and patronizing. Basically, we don't much like it.

But are we, well, being too dramatic about "drama"? We broke from our regularly-scheduled programming to find out.