A Jane Austen movie that is never pretty and only occasionally charming; instead, it is troubled, astringent, and touched with melancholy-not unlike the novel.

| Mar 8, 2021

Persuasion is proof that the most repressed love stories can have the sweetest payoff. Like Anne herself, the movie reveals its wonders slowly.

| Jul 7, 2010

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 8, 2004

The film offers the same pleasures as an Austen novel, as the audience sinks into a comforting, orderly world where life-shattering disruptions are handled with elegant ease.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 20, 2003

Austen fans: Prepare to be swept away.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 18, 2002

Vanessa Redgrave has never been more likable on screen than in her buoyantly athletic turn here.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Much of the movie's emotional work has to be done by...faces and eyes, while other people speak of other things, and to see that happening is frustrating, because it happens so slowly, and romantic, because it happens at all.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Michell's approach to Persuasion indicates that he is the rarest of literary translators -- one who is genuinely interested in a work's themes, its characters and what the author has to say about the world in which they exist.

| Jan 1, 2000

I can't help but think that Austen would be pleased that this seeming Plain Jane of a picture could be a thing of such beauty and spirit.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Persuasion is Jane without pain, E-Z Austen. It's a delight.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

There's a wonderful, unhurried delicacy about Persuasion, Roger Mitchell's adaptation of Jane Austen's final novel.

| Jan 1, 2000

| Original Score: A- | Sep 27, 1995