Elle Fanning's performance illuminates this story of passion, imagination, and fierce independence.

| Oct 12, 2021

The movie, which gradually slows to a crawl, could have used a little galvanism itself.

| Apr 9, 2020

The movie is still well executed but, at two hours, not even Fanning's persuasive performance can elevate it to being more than a moderately interesting historical drama.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 12, 2018

If it falls short of its ambitions, you have to love that it tries to go for the big story, and that it gives Elle Fanning such a grand role at her tender age.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 12, 2018

The Shelleys are cut from the CW world, or from another bad Douglas Booth-starring literary film, 2013's Romeo and Juliet.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jul 10, 2018

Unfortunately the film lacks any singular slant. It fills in details about Mary's life, but there's never any sense of a thesis being advanced.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 9, 2018

While it feels stretched at two hours, its teen-movie digressions work well as opportunities to apply contemporary feminist critiques to the Romantics.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 8, 2018

Most of all the film is a tribute to its brave and uncompromising women, Shelley and Al-Mansour.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 6, 2018

Fanning holds the screen as someone intent on writing her own destiny.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 6, 2018

Mary Shelley is an intelligent, probing, well-acted biopic with a strong feminist slant.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 5, 2018

It's a story of super-heroism in disguise from the early 19th century, in a mostly London-set literary milieu that's captured with curious and probing compassion.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 5, 2018

The story is all blood, sex, lust, love and death but director Haifaa al-Mansour's period drama is just too pretty and polite.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 5, 2018

Every personage passes before us, conscientiously researched, quacking their literalistic dialogue, while the camera shoots them. Dead, in some cases.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 4, 2018

A disappointingly straightforward, romance-driven take on a fascinating story of creation, but one that's lifted by a superb central performance by Elle Fanning.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 3, 2018

Ironically, this story about the sources of inspiration is empty of just that: inspiration.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 21, 2018

The film, though handsome and well-acted, reduces Mary Shelley's accomplishments; it's almost over by the time "Frankenstein" gets written, with little attention paid to its author's creative spark.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 13, 2018

As it stands, this monstrously inept creation is more terrifying than any scenario the author conjured up.

| Original Score: 0/5 | Jun 8, 2018

To make boring the revelries of 19th century literati is no mean feat, but it is "Mary Shelley's" chief accomplishment.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 7, 2018

There's nothing internal about Fanning's performance to suggest that Mary is an artist with something she needs to say and that must be said.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 7, 2018

Mary Shelley is a dull, tame and disappointingly conventional biopic that almost never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 1, 2018