It's artsy polyglot baloney. Not house that's this divided against itself could possibly stand.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 29, 2024

Director Bille August creates striking visuals, and her standout cast never fails to hold attention, though it fails to catch Allende's nuance as a writer.

| Aug 11, 2021

The greatest actors in the world can't overcome a script that boils everything down to the Esperanto of cliche.

| May 22, 2018

Nearly every magic detail, many key characters and half a generation has been sacrificed to clarify the plot. But so much has been cut away that only the skeleton of the story remains.

| May 22, 2018

If The House of the Spirits fails to reinvent its traditional form as The Piano did, it still redresses Hollywood's usual sexual politics -- and provides an exotic wallow.

| Dec 12, 2017

It's also a wretched paradox: a big budget, star-driven art film whose very elements subvert its ambitions and turn it into the thing it least wants to be -- a listless '50s-style Hollywood melodrama.

| May 20, 2013

The thing works in its goofy way, mainly because Bille August is a man of apparently dauntless conviction. He has written and directed every scene with serene authority.

| May 20, 2013

The flaws aren't fatal. The beauty and brilliance that might have been, don't preclude the quality and bravery that exist on the screen.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 20, 2013

The House of the Spirits is like Gone With the Wind with the fun and excitement replaced by lofty. All that's left is the wind.

| Original Score: 1/5 | May 20, 2013

How can an accomplished director take a great novel, the best actors working and the finest technicians available and make a film so... bland? It's a puzzlement.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 20, 2013

This isn't just a bad movie -- it's hugely, grandiosely, pompously bad.

| Original Score: 1/4 | May 20, 2013

Similar epics are made with more conviction and less pretension on daytime 온라인카지노추천.

| May 20, 2013

The film version stresses political intrigue and revolutionary violence at The expense of the anything-goes dreaminess that gives the book its most memorable moments. A stellar cast doesn't help much.

| May 20, 2013

Inert from its opening moments to its too-long-delayed close, this lackluster production is an example of international filmmaking at its least attractive, and a misstep in the careers of pretty much everyone involved.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | May 20, 2013

It's always painful when a brilliant book becomes a bust of a movie.

| May 20, 2013

This is really quite an achievement. It brings together Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Winona Ryder, Antonio Banderas, and Vanessa Redgrave and insures that, without exception, they all give their worst performances ever.

| May 20, 2013

The story, from the best-selling novel by Isabel Allende, is purely incidental to the unintentionally hysterical stylings of this potential camp cult film. It's truly awful, and one shouldn't miss it for the world.

| Original Score: 1/4 | May 20, 2013

Given the talents involved, the film's hesitations in style and consistent failure to really move must be counted as a major disappointment.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 20, 2013

August's earnest International Motion Picture Adaptation remains all too tethered to earth, weighted down by a surfeit of good intentions.

| Original Score: C | Sep 7, 2011

Antonio Banderas invigorates this glum gothic family saga as a defiant young Chilean revolutionary. And without her idea for The House of The Spirits, Isabel Allende insists she would not be a writer today.

| Apr 30, 2011