[Director] Dunmore creates a memorably grimy London, but the moral grime covering the film proves less memorable.

Full Review | Original Score: D+ | Nov 27, 2006

I enjoyed it - or much of it - for reasons that have everything to do with Johnny Depp.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 1, 2006

The story, like the cinematography, is overly foggy and under-illuminated.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2006

Has some choice words to say about following one's heart in matters of art.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 18, 2006

What emerges from the bilious murk of first-time director Laurence Dunmore's film is a sad picture of an intelligent and talented writer who opted for self-indulgence and gratuitous insult over anything more meaningful.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 10, 2006

As the character grows sicker and quieter, the drama's energy fades.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 10, 2006

The point seems to be that too much of a good thing leads to a vast sense of nothingness and bleak cinematography. Alas, it also results in transforming a film about a sensualist into a remarkably sexless enterprise.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 10, 2006

From time to time, a gem-like line shines from the squalor, but in general, it's merely the film's suffocating cynicism that registers.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 10, 2006

Depp's depraved character does have twisted poignancy.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 10, 2006

A movie that serves up what its debauched subject would never have countenanced -- sanitized smut with a moral attached.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 10, 2006

Dunmore slogs through the story with an overripe sense of gravity that, when mixed with the film's carefully botched look, makes for one murky moviegoing experience.

| Original Score: D+ | Mar 10, 2006

Without context and reason to care, I never understood why I was lurking about here the first place.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 10, 2006

Rochester may have been a cultural visionary, but the movie reduces this notion to a parable of bad-boy celebrity hitched to an uninteresting love story.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 10, 2006

It's a bit too muddy, dismal-looking and smoky to beguile us, too fixated on filth and too dreary-looking to really shock us.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 10, 2006

Stinkers this rapturously self-assured don't come along often, and when they do, they deserve to be honored with the proper giggling disbelief.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 10, 2006

Depp portrays Wilmot, who was also remembered for scandalous poetry and theatrical satire, as a careless and generally unpleasant fellow, who is neither funny nor profound. And we're supposed to spend two hours with this guy. Ugh.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Mar 10, 2006

It is Depp, as the debauched and decaying Restoration rake, who holds the camera. It's a strong, sturdy performance, but one that asks more of the audience than it might be possible to give.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 9, 2006

One of the few films to maintain an air of stuffiness even while sharing intimate details of debauchery.

| Original Score: C+ | Mar 9, 2006

We are supposed to thrill to the devil-may-care attitude of this Byronic rebel-gent, yet we never find out what he's about or what he stands for. He's a self-impressed question mark.

| Mar 9, 2006

You will not like the Second Earl of Rochester. But you will not be able to take your eyes from him. Having made his bed, he does not hesitate to sleep in it.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 9, 2006