It is an elegant and sophisticated film, one that never condescends or shirks from the complexity of the novel and its grand themes - war, love, sex, memory, betrayal, redemption - but it's also strangely unfeeling.

| Aug 23, 2018

| Original Score: A- | Feb 14, 2012

Atonement is a film out of balance, nimble enough in its first half but oddly scattered and ungainly once it leaves the grounds of the Tallis estate.

| Sep 22, 2008

[U]ltimately, the movie amounts to rolling lawns, lovely costumes, and characters that simply fail to resonate.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 1, 2008

Sweeping, showy, and stiff, Joe Wright's adaptation of Ian McEwan's pedigreed bestseller traffics in florid staging and callow emotions.

| Original Score: C+ | Jan 29, 2008

Atonement's extraordinary qualities outweigh any quibbles.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/6 | Jan 18, 2008

One of the few adaptations that gives a novel the film it deserves.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 14, 2008

Somehow the intensity of McEwan's voice hasn't survived and once we move beyond the magic of that lost summer's day, the film becomes a strangely cool and cerebral experience.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 21, 2007

This is a film that might have contained itself better, but it still stings with bitter truth.

| Original Score: B | Dec 14, 2007

Imagination typically should be encouraged in children, but an excess of it leads to tragedy in this more than worthy adaptation of Ian McEwan's 2002 novel.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 14, 2007

In its first 45 minutes, Atonement achieves a kind of perfection rare even for big Oscar-bait movies. Every facet of the filmmaking is the equal of any picture released this year. The rest of the movie isn't so bad.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 13, 2007

Atonement is perfect.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 10, 2007

Atonement has hints of greatness but I think it falls just short of Oscar contention.

Full Review | Dec 10, 2007

A lushly shot, proficiently performed, and largely stultifying period piece that invites only mild, detached admiration.

| Original Score: C+ | Dec 7, 2007

It ranks with the best novel adaptations of recent times.

Full Review | Dec 7, 2007

As good a film as one could imagine having been made from a great work of contemporary fiction.

| Dec 7, 2007

Atonement is not only too polite but maddeningly orderly, resulting in a prettily cast, professionally performed, impeccably mounted bore.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 7, 2007

On paper and on screen, Atonement is a story of rare beauty, both wrenching and wise.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 7, 2007

Atonement takes a familiar movie environment, a setting that we think we know, and uses it for an examination of a host of dark impulses, such as jealousy, lust, cruelty and deceit.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 7, 2007

Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton not only blow the Merchant-Ivory dust off the British period movie, they transform Ian McEwan's interior novel into a sweeping epic that speaks to the 21st-century soul.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 7, 2007