It feels like lockdown in 19th-century fancy dress.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 19, 2021

It's deadly dull, clogged with all kinds of string and piano music and sunk by a perplexingly lifeless performance by Dakota Fanning as Gray.

| Apr 9, 2015

Fanning's controlled presence is ideal for a tale of Victorian repression. But as the film becomes one of quiet liberation, it needs more than her cool reserve.

| Apr 5, 2015

...attractively shot, appealingly acted, and decorously eye-opening.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Apr 3, 2015

Wise, who is noticeably older than the 29-year-old Ruskin was at the time the events occurred in real life, gives a tense, implacable performance, and Fanning is touching. The movie, however, directed by Richard Laxton, could use a lot more oomph.

| Original Score: B- | Apr 3, 2015

A skilled cast fails to lift a morbidly recounted true tale...

| Original Score: 2.00 | Apr 3, 2015

"Effie Gray" runs 108 minutes, yet it feels like it ends right before the real drama is about to begin.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 3, 2015

With a script by Emma Thompson, you might expect Effie Gray to have the same period-piece poignancy as her 1995 take on Sense and Sensibility. No such luck.

| Original Score: C+ | Apr 3, 2015

Effie Gray is peculiarly compelling, even if the issue of sexual repression, all the Victorian manners, seem light-years gone and close to unfathomable.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 3, 2015

Fanning feels wafer-thin and out of her element. She's appropriately wan, but as we never know Effie's potential, her loss of identity has minimal punch.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 3, 2015

The best thing about the ultimately involving way this romantic drama ends up on screen is that it's sure to arouse enough interest to make those who don't already know the outcome more than eager to look it up.

| Apr 2, 2015

While it has some lovely moments, "Effie Gray" is a bit underwhelming; it's odd that an artist so acclaimed for her wit would produce a script so chilly, so dour.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 2, 2015

Thompson herself plays a sort of proto-feminist advisor, but the enemy here isn't misogyny so much as it is gynophobia.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 2, 2015

Visually voluptuous, though the pacing occasionally suggests watching a Pre-Raphaelite dry.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 2, 2015

It's a lamentable if not especially engrossing story, part wronged-woman narrative, part marital horror movie.

| Apr 2, 2015

Thompson largely succeeds at giving Effie a voice, much as Fanning succeeds at beautifully bringing it to life. But the world around Effie remains crudely drawn, and in that respect the film can only do so much justice to her story.

| Apr 2, 2015

The counterpoint of styles comments on Ruskin with irony and subtlety; as such it succeeds as criticism - and as art.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 2, 2015

It's a sumptuously elegant picture, but a disappointingly timid and decorous work that takes more care in outlining oppression than in creating a compelling protagonist. Her suffering is interesting, but she is not.

| Original Score: 70/100 | Apr 2, 2015

The movie has a very methodical pace, which sometimes verges on sluggish. And the soft focus of certain light-filled scenes doesn't make Effie look angelic so much as it makes the director appear amateurish.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 2, 2015

On a purely technical level, Effie Gray is fine, if uninspired, with its washed-out color, attention to detail, and lack of heavy-handed moralizing. As an experience, though, it's a drag without much reward.

| Original Score: C | Apr 2, 2015