The Portrait of a Lady is a measured, intelligent film that does not fit expectations of a simple book-to-film adaptation. Campion’s direction is confident and the liberties she takes only strengthen the film’s emotional resonance.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 1, 2025

Campion excels at revealing the elements that men don’t see in themselves that women find appealing, while also turning the tables and revealing the darkness of a society where men are always right.

| Jun 6, 2024

Campion makes an unruly costume drama out of the 1881 novel by Henry James.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 12, 2021

The director has a brilliant eye. But she fails to get behind the eyes of her heroine.

| Mar 27, 2019

This claustrophobic Portrait of a Lady is the kind of failure only a very gifted filmmaker could make: like it or not, it haunts you.

| Dec 7, 2018

Portrait feels like an elegant party, full of attractive people, beautiful finery and tremendous music (from Wojiech Kilar), yet no excitement. And no matter how many times you revisit the place, it never gets better.

| Oct 27, 2018

This is a film that appeals to the head far more than to the heart, making for a portrait that seems somewhat less than complete.

| Oct 27, 2018

Ten years on, the drama is still too slow but the film is far more watchable in the comfort of one's home with the pause button at the ready.

| Oct 27, 2018

Director Jane Campion not only alludes to the contemporary resonance of this hundred-year-old tale, but with this bold stamp she lays claim to the story that follows as wholly her own.

| Oct 27, 2018

The beauty of Jane Campion's film lies not in what is said, but what is not said. The understated is beautifully captured in this stunning period piece.

| Oct 27, 2018

Jane Campion and screenwriter Laura Jones have... produced an adaptation as cinematically intelligent as it is faithful to the original.

| Oct 27, 2018

Throughout Portrait there is a nagging sensation that makes one want to ask, "But where is all this going?"

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 26, 2018

As much as director Jane Campion claims to love Henry James' 1881 novel Portrait of a Lady, her movie of it is Jane Eyre all over again, a romantic horror story.

| Oct 26, 2018

Breathtakingly beautiful in parts, Portrait as a whole is pretentious, stifling and taxing.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 26, 2018

The point of this imagery is not that Isabel has relapsed into the figure of the Gothic heroine, but that that figure in part informs her sense of self.

| Oct 26, 2018

The film wraps with triumphantly, if obliquely, in a gothically bleak snowy England after the false sunshine of Italy. The film's beautiful cinematography and locations are complimented by a hauntingly romantic score.

| Original Score: A | Oct 26, 2018

I find Portrait of a Lady to be one of the years best.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 26, 2018

The Portrait of a Lady risks being reduced to a quaint 19th-century Dating Game with adoring bachelors appearing at every turn.

| Oct 26, 2018

Yes, I wanted to smack every character in this film, but mostly I wanted to smack Isabel.

| Oct 26, 2018

As director of Henry James' classic novel, [Campion] gives no true understanding of how the bold, independent Kidman is not someone that would be admired at that time for those qualities especially when she turns down suitors to do some globe trotting.

| Oct 26, 2018