Barthes feels the need to improve on Flaubert, adding and dropping scenes and inventing social metaphors - mainly spiderwebs and corsets.

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

For a film about passion, it feels oddly flat and often passionless.

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

With her thousand-mile frown, Mia Wasikowska was born to play Victorian heroines, though she's a little too intelligent and self-aware for Flaubert's Emma Bovary.

| Jun 18, 2015

It's an effective treatment of the book, only occasionally made distracting by the hodgepodge of accents sported by an international cast performing in English.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 17, 2015

This umpteenth adaptation of Flaubert's classic novel at least chooses its Emma wisely ...

| Original Score: B | Jun 15, 2015

For all the talk of romance, this is a Madame Bovary that's grounded in the real - in the sounds and colors of Emma's world, in its material limitations and splendors.

| Jun 13, 2015

The Normandy locations are evocative, but director Sophie Barthes compresses Emma's multiyear rise and fall into what seems like a month or so.

| Original Score: C | Jun 12, 2015

After more than a century and a half, Emma Bovary is a classic ball of decidedly human confusion that just keeps on giving.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 12, 2015

There's little tension as her romantic and financial calamities collide, only mere traces of tragedy. Even at nearly two hours, much-needed character development is sorely lacking.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 12, 2015

It is not hard to believe that Ms. Wasikowska is Madame Bovary - she is at once serious and shallow, willful and indecisive, powerful and helpless - but this "Madame Bovary" is unfortunately not quite itself.

| Jun 11, 2015

In an ideal version of the novel, we would empathize deeply with her dilemma at the same time as we would cringe at the nature of the choices she makes. Sadly, this "Madame Bovary" makes that identification harder than it should be.

| Jun 11, 2015

This "Madame Bovary" may not quite be Flaubert's, but it's lovely to look at all the same.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 11, 2015

The tragedy accelerates impressively, but the well-acted film doesn't leave us wiser about the enigmatic, ever-doomed figure at the center of things.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 11, 2015

"Madame Bovary's" attempt to give Flaubert's text the benefit of a 21st-century feminist perspective is admirable if unsuccessful.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 11, 2015

Unafraid to make Emma decidedly unsympathetic, Wasikowska tries hard to convey the character's sense of feeling stifled by her era, but the movie still can't quite capture her shallow depth.

| Original Score: C+ | Jun 11, 2015

Realistic and refined, but uneven and disappointing.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 10, 2015

The performances mostly come up short. Wasikowska does sullenness well, but her sexual yearning reads as more of the same.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 10, 2015

The trick with any adaptation of Flaubert's brilliantly humdrum tragedy: how to make ennui engaging. Director Sophie Barthes has little luck in this latest trek down Madame Bovary's road to Rouen.

| Jun 10, 2015

Sophie Barthes neglects to thoroughly conceive of Emma's plight, instead making only sporadic gestures to it.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 7, 2015

Barthes' film succeeds in depicting a woman in 19th century France for whom "life is a disappointment", but fails to explore why she might behave differently from countless other people with the same lament.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 17, 2014