Deepa Mehta's film is only intermittently engaging: it is limited in scope and imagination, and in parts it becomes plodding and stagey.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 21, 2019

The trouble with... Midnight's Children, aside from the fact it is a mess and a muddle, is that it goes on and on and on and on. And on. And on. And then, just when you think it has to be over, it goes on some more.

| Sep 4, 2018

Never complex enough to work as an allegory of the complex relationship between India and Pakistan.

| May 15, 2018

Amidst all the exuberance on screen, a major literary work has been given a new and accessible form of life.

| Jun 14, 2013

The effort to pack an already overstuffed picaresque epic into a film of more than two hours ends up an indigestible stew.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 24, 2013

The film is beautifully shot, with vivid production design. But because of the tale's lack of cohesion, it doesn't carry enough emotional heft.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 9, 2013

Faithfully adapted from Salman Rushdie's award-winning 1981 novel, the movie feels both too packed and too slight, overflowing with vivid details but lacking the structure to support their weight.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 9, 2013

There are enough intermittent passages of power and beauty to get you through the slow spots.

| Original Score: B | May 3, 2013

A pretty but staidly linear epic drained of the novel's larkish, metaphorical sweep, and a collection of multi-generational love stories lacking their originally eccentric, fizzy charm.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | May 3, 2013

Mehta has given us something as pale as it is panoramic.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 2, 2013

Rushdie's characteristic antic humor animates the family scenes, but the movie gets bogged down in endless plot convolutions and whimsy (the material would have worked better as a 온라인카지노추천 miniseries).

Full Review | Apr 29, 2013

In its steady great-books way, the film is often truthful and moving.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 26, 2013

A movie that, if never exactly dull, feels drained of the mythic juice that powers the book, which won the Booker Prize in 1981.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 25, 2013

The cinematography is memorably vibrant, and the performances are solid, even if they pass by too swiftly. Most of all, of course, the subject matter remains fascinating.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 25, 2013

Midnight's Children has the paradoxical misfortune of being both too rushed and too wearingly long.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 23, 2013

So lavish and unwieldy is the book, Rushdie's best, that a film of it can't help but feel like a helpless reduction, like a bucket of water passed off as an ocean.

| Apr 23, 2013

It's a vibrant journey, but not a terribly illuminating one.

| Apr 22, 2013

The film is ambitious and often sumptuous to watch but not always dramatically satisfying.

| Apr 22, 2013

Preserves much of the novel's intricacy and human drama, perhaps due to Salman Rushdie's involvement as co-screenwriter, even if it remains singularly unremarkable from a cinematic perspective.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 21, 2013

Considering Midnight's Children is bound up in notions of identity, it is faintly disastrous that this adaptation should be so lacking in one of its own.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 31, 2012