Despite its faults, The Magnificent Ambersons stands tall as an example of great filmmaking. The performances, Welles’s direction, and the production design make this picture worth your viewing.

| Feb 20, 2024

After the neorealistic revolution of Citizen Kane's cinematographic achievement, then, The Magnificent Ambersons becomes the consecration, in some sort of stripped-down and ultimately classical way, of a new mode of screen narration.

| Dec 8, 2021

The Magnificent Ambersons is a deliciously photographed time capsule, with Albert S. D'Agostino's impressive set designs belying the craftsmanship and detail which went into recreating turn-of-the-century Indianapolis.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 18, 2020

Welles has a knack for heart-rending stories rife with comeuppance, tragedy, remembrance, doomed romance, and, most superbly, the pleasures of forgiveness and closure.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 13, 2020

True, there are wonderful authentic period touches, excellent dramatic photographic work and fine direction of a wonderful cast. Welles has employed so much subtlety, however... that the resultant effect is vague and even meaninglessly depressing.

| Jul 24, 2020

Film snobs like to say that this, the second feature from Orson Welles, is even better than Citizen Kane. That's a stretch, but it's certainly exquisitely beautiful film-making - there are frames in there to die for.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 13, 2019

Orson Welles continues to be incredible, super original, and an unsurpassable artist from the beginning to the end of the movie. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Sep 17, 2019

In trying so feverishly to be realistic, Welles has drained the life pretty much out of the Indiana family of whom Tarkington once wrote so straight-forwardly that he won a Pulitzer prize for his efforts.

| Aug 9, 2019

The Magnificent Ambersons may not coalesce into a fully-realized masterwork ... but it doesn't need to be when it appropriately becomes about far more than its narrative.

| Apr 23, 2019

A haunting and rueful examination of a changing way of life and the fortunes (and failures) of those with limited vision.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 25, 2019

one of Hollywood's great tragedies both on-screen and off

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 16, 2018

Butchering of The Magnificent Ambersons is indefensible, yet Welles critics have been making excuses for it for years. Significantly, it happened during wartime, when hysteria becomes internalized and can leach into anything.

| Nov 27, 2018

The bold cinematic techniques Welles employed in Citizen Kane are put to even more sophisticated use here.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 16, 2015

The performances, the cinematography, the melancholy tone of loss make [The Magnificent Ambersons] one of the most technically inspired films of Hollywood's past.

| Apr 16, 2015

Even in this truncated form it's amazing and memorable.

| Jan 5, 2015

Visually creative classic.

| Aug 22, 2014

Ambersons is not another Citizen Kane, but it is good enough to remove Director Welles for keeps from the novice or one-picture-prodigy class.

| Mar 12, 2013

The editors might have molested it, but The Magnificent Ambersons remains on a par with Orson Welles's greatest achievements.

| Aug 30, 2012

What remains is inevitably, irritatingly uneven, but still tender and insightful. It will cut you up.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 30, 2012

Although reams have been written about the mutilation of Orson Welles' second feature, what remains of it is nevertheless a major accomplishment.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 30, 2012