The film traces Martin's love affair with the pursuit of individual advancement. Like capitalism, it's seductive.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 12, 2021

In Italian star Luca Marinelli, he's cast a true-blue matinee idol as the tortured hero: in an extraordinary performance that matches brute physicality to soulful interior yearning, he carries the film on square shoulders.

| Jul 9, 2021

So much narrative ambition can be enervating, but Marinelli's performance is mesmerizing. It helps that he is broodingly beautiful, somewhere between Brando and Belmondo

| Jun 24, 2021

Despite the liberties it takes with the source material, the film is dramatically and emotionally immensely satisfying.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 18, 2021

A sweep of cinematic history earned by the film's aspirations. No film could replicate the tragic weight of London's work, but this comes awfully close.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 13, 2020

What ideas "Martin Eden" has are borrowed straight from the novel; what substance the novel has the movie removes, leaving its one big, notable idea emblazoned on it like a sticker on the bumper of a car being sold in a commercial...

| Oct 25, 2020

Every so often, a spark in Marinelli's mesmerizing blue-gray eyes flickers and you can imagine the passion that drove the man to his madness. In those moments, Martin Eden subtly flames, if only briefly.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 21, 2020

The film is a masterpiece... see it any way you can.

| Oct 19, 2020

Like a vast Italian repast, Martin Eden serves up a load of deep dish delights, but the final couple of courses are overcooked to the point where you're tempted to spit them out.

| Oct 19, 2020

The sort of movie that restores your faith in an art form-or, at the very least, in the craft of turning a bygone era's paragraphs on a page into an urgent mix of sound and vision.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 19, 2020

[H]opefulness and rawness, much like society and the self, are ultimately inextricable in "Martin Eden," a work of art that abounds in its own beautiful contradictions.

| Oct 16, 2020

It's a slog at over two hours, much of it spent with Marinelli screaming or acting coarse.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 16, 2020

In his brash, vivid adaptation, Pietro Marcello has unmoored the text from its original country and era, boldly reimagining Jack London's alter ego as a Neapolitan seafarer in a deliberately imprecise time, roughly post-World War I to the 1970s.

| Oct 16, 2020

A movie that arrives like a bolt out of the blue, bursting with ideas, not unlike its hero.

| Oct 16, 2020

The film is a romance, of sorts, yet it also wields an anti-romantic ferocity, suggesting that the fissure between rich and poor is, whatever we yearn to think, unbridgeable.

| Oct 16, 2020

The true miracle of this film is how Marcello translates both London's scabrous tone and his lush, character-revealing prose into pure cinema.

| Oct 15, 2020

"Martin Eden" is old-school cinematic soul food - a sweepingly stylish and smart Italian coming-of-age drama that feels as if it could have been made 60 years ago, during the heyday of Visconti.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 14, 2020

Possesses a weight and heft, both cinematically and philosophically, that make it a rare treat.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 14, 2020

Yet without dumbing down its message, Marcello's sweeping Künstlerroman has all the pleasurable characteristics of a simmering romance and a poignant tragedy, too.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 13, 2020

Martin Eden works better as a story of self-loathing and self-destruction than it does as a social critique or political statement.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 12, 2019