The Crucible benefits from an increasingly compelling midsection and second half focused on Day-Lewis’ commanding figure...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 2, 2024

Raymond Rouleau’s French-East German coproduction should provide something of a revelation...

| Nov 30, 2023

Finally transformed into a chilling and expressive film by Nicholas Hytner, director of The Madness of King George, Miller's script remains a razor-sharp interrogation of religious dread, mob rule, and, most of all, sexual hysteria.

| Dec 27, 2022

The Crucible earned two Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress (Allen) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Miller), but it should have received many more, including one for Best Picture -- it's truly one of the great forgotten films of its era.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 10, 2022

Perhaps understanding the distance that these fictional interpretations have created, The Crucible seems to invite a moral and emotional, rather then political reading.

| Dec 7, 2018

The miracle of Nicholas Hytner's rigorous, taut film arises from its ability to capture the high theatricality of its life in the theater.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 5, 2018

A competent, uncontroversial, rather shouty version of a play which is now safely canonical and, if the philistinism may be forgiven, less remarkable than it once seemed, when dramas of the liberal conscience had an urgent edge.

| Dec 5, 2018

The clarity of the direction and the quality of the acting make it the best rendition of the author's work that any of us is likely to see either on screen or on stage.

| Mar 2, 2018

Plodding film based on play has mature themes, sex, violence

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 26, 2016

Then there's always Mr. Scofield, bringing an almost unbearable, yet entirely believable, lightness of spirit to his loathsome character. It's a bold stroke by a great actor, making zealotry and evil seem positively beneficent.

| May 17, 2013

I recommend Hytner's movie highly, but a part of me resists a work that makes the audience feel as noble in our moral certainty as the characters it invites us to deplore. Some part of its power seems borrowed from the thing it hates.

| May 17, 2013

Her cheeks flush, her winsome beauty seared with erotic rage, Ryder exposes the real roots of the piece. Forget McCarthyism; The Crucible is a colonial Fatal Attraction.

| May 17, 2013

Too bad, though, that The Crucible fails to probe deeper into the sexual, religious, and political conditions that can give false accusations so much power -- even today.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 17, 2013

Arthur Miller's screenplay keeps everything nice and faithful to the period, and the actors have the dirt on their hands to prove it. The movie lacks polish as well, and that's to everyone's benefit.

| May 17, 2013

A McCarthy-era retelling of the Salem witch trials, Arthur Miller's 1953 play is a literary classic, but this adap falls short.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 17, 2013

The story's sickening spiral into madness is preserved.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 17, 2013

An intelligent and gripping epic.

| May 17, 2013

I very much admire how Hytner... keeps the pace swift and doesn't fetishize the 17th-century decors and clothes. But I can't help feeling that in more ways than one, The Crucible is a period piece.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 17, 2013

What happened in long-ago Salem does still seem to matter.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 17, 2013

The story is unchanged, but its theme relates surprisingly well to today's versions of the bias and scapegoating that Miller rightly deplores.

| May 17, 2013