If you take it completely on its own terms and don't see it as an Austen adaptation, there's stuff in it that is fun.

| Feb 6, 2024

There’s nothing wrong with updating Austen, but this isn’t so much updating the book as performing a gut renovation.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 24, 2022

A joyful, tongue in cheek and thoroughly self-aware parody.

| Jul 29, 2022

The film, to the extent that it works, works well on its own as a fairly enjoyable Regency rom-com.

| Jul 22, 2022

Austen works hard. But mediocrity, this movie reminds us, works harder.

| Jul 18, 2022

If you're a Jane Austen completist, don't miss "Persuasion." Otherwise, there are many better options out there.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 18, 2022

Persuasion at times seems embarrassed by its source material, or at least overeager to spruce it up for audiences that might not be able to handle a gentler pace. The result is harried and forgettable.

| Jul 15, 2022

If there is any electricity in Persuasion, it is Johnson who is acting as the generator; it’s a pity the film fails to harness it effectively enough to be persuasive in its vision.

| Jul 15, 2022

Cracknell has gone and done a strange thing with the book: She has tried to modernize it... while casting a free-spirited, fully liberated American star, Dakota Johnson, as Anne — all of which strips the novel of its core tension.

| Jul 15, 2022

Cracknell's Persuasion combines the classic and the contemporary with innovative, resonant craftsmanship.

| Original Score: B | Jul 15, 2022

Dakota Johnson plays Elliot as the kind of woman who has 87K Twitter followers eating up the laid-back 280-character barbs that guard her wounded heart.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 15, 2022

Is “Persuasion” really that bad? If you have any respect for the works of Jane Austen, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 15, 2022

Johnson, and several of the supporting players, manage to hold the film together when the lack of stakes and emotional weight threaten to pull it apart.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 15, 2022

Persuasion is all agony.

| Jul 15, 2022

Cracknell’s romp is, despite what the purists say, a perfectly pleasant variation of a text that could endure worse, but it feels stranded between two competing approaches.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 15, 2022

This contemporary-ish, Fleabag-style version of Anne Elliot, undoubtedly Austen’s most mature heroine, is not an accurate representation of the canon. And yet, I did not care a whit. ‘Twas the perfect distraction I needed for a maudlin summer evening.

| Jul 15, 2022

The character's perky level of sass may not be as she was originally committed to the page, but Austen's works have proved nothing but adaptable, and Johnson makes the character, and thereby the story's telling, work.

| Original Score: B | Jul 14, 2022

... No laurels are due to the creative team behind Persuasion. This Netflix adaptation appears birthed by the success of the streamer’s Bridgerton, mashing it up with Fleabag by someone who only knows literature through the Spark Notes Twitter account.

| Original Score: D+ | Jul 14, 2022

Does it come across as a bit precious at times? Yes. Is it particularly groundbreaking? No. Am I going to ask and answer one more question here and tell you if this is a light and breezy confection with delightful performances? You betcha.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 14, 2022

The movie’s getting-down-on-the-youngs’-level pose often feels rather condescending, the result of a bad assumption about younger audiences’ capacity to understand or connect with something that isn’t spoon fed to them.

| Jul 14, 2022