The whole production feels verged on the perch of camp.

| Sep 28, 2017

It's far from perfect, but it's not a bad stab at tricky material.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 27, 2016

McGregor and Connelly are good as dad and mum, Hannah Nordberg and Dakota Fanning even better as, at different ages, Merry.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 27, 2016

It's honourable, it's well-intentioned, but it's lame.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 13, 2016

There's a crippling lack of emotional depth and honesty - it's hard to decide which is more stridently melodramatic, the bombast of the score or the shrill performances.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 13, 2016

It is, however, a heartfelt and painstaking attempt at dealing in filmic terms with the complex and ambiguous subject matter of the book.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 10, 2016

Ewan McGregor's directorial debut doesn't do justice to Philip Roth's great book.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 10, 2016

McGregor's performance has sincerity of a frowningly oppressive kind, but the whole thing is tinged with self-pity.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 10, 2016

Roth's book, which attends with horror and dismay to the forces ripping America apart in the second half of the 20th century, has suffered a treatment that mechanically extracts its guts.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 10, 2016

[The film] roughly sticks to the plot points of the novel but sheds its nuance.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 10, 2016

It's hard to begrudge such an earnest endeavour, but this is missing the wit, nuance, and insight of a book thought by many - correctly, maybe - to be unadaptable.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 10, 2016

The direction of the film is so matter-of-fact, the storytelling so obvious, the lack of nuance so palpable, that it seems to actually take its alarmist and patronising attitudes towards change at face value.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 10, 2016

McGregor's directorial debut is a well-crafted drama but lacks the depth of Roth's masterful book.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 3, 2016

Is McGregor a bad director? Lord knows he's not the first to swing and whiff at Roth. I'll give him a mulligan here.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 27, 2016

I haven't read the book, but I'm guessing Roth brought more nuance and authority to its story of a New Jersey family in the 1960s and '70s than McGregor and screenwriter John Romano have with this cultural cartoon.

| Oct 27, 2016

It might have fared better as a 온라인카지노추천 mini-series, where novelistic plot strands can be unpacked at length. McGregor is simply wrong for his role: He's too young, too modern, too smart.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 27, 2016

The actors emote deeply and energetically, but there's a disquieting sheen of artifice.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 25, 2016

The movie feels flat and small, lacking the novel's energy and expansive ambition.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 24, 2016

It's a remarkably committed effort that takes a few seriously misguided turns along the way, even as its actors lunge at psychological depth with every scene.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 22, 2016

There was reason to expect more from American Pastoral, and just as much reason to figure it was doomed from the start.

| Original Score: D | Oct 21, 2016