It's a film made in the image of Dickinson and her poetry, in other words: starkly original, but without much show of fuss.

| Aug 10, 2017

Davies doesn't shrink from the challenges this darkened mood poses for his audience.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 26, 2017

It's a singular life, marred by the fact that Dickinson didn't live to enjoy the admiration her poems now attract. And I can't think of another director with the sensibility to put it on screen.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 21, 2017

When one artist makes a film about another artist, you can be reasonably sure the first sees something of a mirror in the second. That's true here in Terence Davies' beautiful, formally demanding and quite searing portrait of the poet Emily Dickinson.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 21, 2017

This is a film of subtle beauty.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 11, 2017

It's not easy to do justice to such a beloved, enigmatic artist, but "A Quiet Passion" was well worth the wait.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 11, 2017

The rich imagery and controlled composition seem alternately to highlight Dickinson's unfettered art and to mock her sadly fettered life.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 5, 2017

A Quiet Passion's manneredness overwhelmed me at times, but it is very effective - chilling, even - in its charting of one woman's disappointed journey to the rhetorical coda of her own life: "Why has the world become so ugly?"

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 4, 2017

Stick with it, and keep your eyes on Nixon; a still, gentle-voiced presence whose eyes glow like blue embers.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 4, 2017

A delicate and measured drama that plumbs the depths of the poet's strange heart and the agony of her intelligence.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 4, 2017

Davies chooses to mark Dickinson's life story not so much by specific events, but by her character, and Nixon captures the many facets of it with bite and empathy.

Full Review | May 1, 2017

A Quiet Passion is about the life we lead in private and our attempts to please both the public and private spheres. Cynthia Nixon is nothing short of luminous.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Apr 28, 2017

Davies specializes in period pieces and here he captures Dickinson's miserable isolation and terrible intelligence perfectly.

| Original Score: A | Apr 28, 2017

Davies works Dickinson's poetry into the script, resulting in violently bipolar shifts in mood and overly mannered dialogue. The writing is here, but the author is much harder to pinpoint.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 26, 2017

I appreciate [Davie's] desire to counteract the usual romantic cinematic clichés of divinely inspired tortured souls, but he's overcorrected and created an anti-cliché: the harridan as heroine.

| Original Score: C | Apr 21, 2017

A brilliant chronicling of a life lived quietly, one that is sweeping in its emotional depth rather than its narrative scope.

| Apr 21, 2017

It is through Nixon's brilliant performance that "A Quiet Passion" illuminates, complicates and ultimately transcends the mystery of its subject's confinement.

| Apr 20, 2017

A Quiet Passion is wittier, in its early stretches, than anyone might have foreseen, but it's when the door closes, and the Dickinsons are alone with their trepidations, that the movie draws near to its rightful severity.

| Apr 17, 2017

Nixon vividly telegraphs both her character's convictions and her deep physical and emotional suffering.

| Original Score: B | Apr 14, 2017

It is grounded, and made most exemplary, by Cynthia Nixon's performance.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 14, 2017