The elegant savagery of the author Richard Yates’s dialogue, which reads with a gratifyingly poetic violence, doesn’t sit quite as easily in the mouths of actors. Still the performances are forceful...

| Jul 25, 2022

In making a better man out of Frank Wheeler, Mendes and Haythe have, unfortunately, thrown out one of the real achievement's of Yates's novel: his ruthless critique of 1950s masculinity.

| Dec 18, 2020

This is a handsome, intelligent and careful adaptation which may be too bookish... Always fully engrossing, even if it is too coolly detached to ever be involving.

| Aug 29, 2018

It just touched on so many different issues like love, the sanctity of marriage, forgiveness, rage, entrapment, loneliness and helplessness.

| Original Score: A+ | Sep 12, 2017

Handsomely done and beautifully acted, just slightly wanting in a screenplay that leaves questions unanswered about what's behind these unhappy people. And it's ultra-depressing...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 30, 2009

This is a sobering, well-observed film that doesn't fully hit the mark but sets up enough pleasing ideas to chew on regarding ambition, marriage and ideals of how to live one's life, individually and as a couple.

| Original Score: 3/6 | Jan 30, 2009

Ultimately, the performances are (rightly) more involving than the story. By the same token, the actors are more involving than the film.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 30, 2009

A deeply felt, moving and genuinely tragic study of a marriage tearing itself apart.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 30, 2009

It feels removed from the messy energies and doomy turbulence it depicts, filtering them through an aesthetic sensibility so tasteful, controlled and ultimately second-hand, that it can impress but never truly move us.

| Jan 30, 2009

It leaves you feeling voyeuristically sullied; scrubbing the blood out of your mental carpet, privy to something simultaneously indulgent and inconsequential.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 30, 2009

Winslet gives Revolutionary Road its depth and heft. That face still gazes at us, with its seraphic blend of beauty and horror, minutes, even hours, after we have left the theatre.

| Jan 30, 2009

This is an honourable attempt to get at the heart of a great novel. Its account of marital failure and of lost illusions is consistently absorbing and occasionally heart-rending.

| Jan 30, 2009

Another accomplished, subtle piece by American Beauty director Sam Mendes (aka Mr Kate Winslet), this looks like a super-gorgeous episode of Mad Men.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 30, 2009

The book and the film may be nailed to their Fifties period (everyone seems to smoke perpetually) but what Revolutionary Road says about not so quietly desperate lives is still appropriate today.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 30, 2009

I don't know anyone who'd want to watch, in these miserable times, a marriage swirling down life's khazi. But that doesn't stop it being a fine piece of work. And while I didn't enjoy it at all, I can definitely recommend it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 30, 2009

If Revolutionary Road had been filmed back in 1961, when the novel came out, it would have been timely and powerful.

| Jan 24, 2009

Does Yates's work stand up today? If you want an insight into the horrors of being married to the wrong person, there's nobody like him. But the result is not so much riveting drama as highly potent aversion therapy.

| Jan 22, 2009

Revolutionary Road ranks right up there with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in its characterization of a coupling deeply scabrous and defective.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 9, 2009

Bitter, nerve-wracking, ugly and relentless, Revolutionary Road is Big Drama done right, a mesmerizing look at desperate lives, wrong moves and spoiled dreams that hits hard right from the beginning and never lets up.

| Original Score: A | Jan 9, 2009

Viewers in the mood for rip-snorting marital combat should go ahead and partake, but they must prepare to leave the theatre in a state of profound depression.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 9, 2009