Screenwriter Rebecca Frayn's full feature debut is alluring, fascinating to watch and, most importantly, makes you care about Suu Kyi.

| Sep 8, 2017

The Lady is a slog, a two-and-a-half hour, painted-on-wood exercise in political iconography.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Apr 27, 2012

"The Lady" is a two-hour trip into earnestness, from which audiences will want a little liberation of their own.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 27, 2012

The Lady is little more than a history lesson - although a beautifully presented one - wrapped in the pink gloss of a G-rated potboiler evidenced in Suu Kyi's and Michael's storybook romance.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 26, 2012

A heavy-handed attempt to sanctify one of the most dignified and uncompromising politicians and human rights champions of recent times.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 20, 2012

[It] does indeed deal with a real life, but follows so faithfully the traditional shape of film biography that it feels less convincing.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 19, 2012

An appropriately respectful and dignified biopic.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 13, 2012

"The Lady" is a portrait in moral and physical courage, a sort of analysis of what constitutes greatness.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 13, 2012

The screen version falls afoul of a laggardly pace, an earnest tone and a surfeit of domesticity.

| Apr 12, 2012

Yeoh is perfectly cast. Slender and graceful, her physical resemblance to Suu Kyi is remarkable.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 12, 2012

"The Lady" presents a stately, rather dull portrayal of a loving marriage stymied by the whims of political necessity and fascist generals.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 12, 2012

"I don't like this cult of personality," Suu Kyi tells her husband on the patio. The Lady, on the other hand, is all for it.

| Apr 12, 2012

Such a rare individual deserves a film that treats her not as a saint, but the remarkable, complex human being she actually is.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 12, 2012

Besson does draw the best out of his two leads but The Lady is a film about an extraordinary woman. So why is it such an ordinary film?

| Original Score: 2.5/5.0 | Apr 12, 2012

The Lady is ... tilted away from the churning melodrama of Suu Kyi's country and toward the intimate dilemma of a loving couple forced apart by circumstance.

| Apr 12, 2012

Given Besson's career-long affinity for visual flash and breathless storytelling, it's especially disappointing that The Lady is so ordinary.

| Original Score: C- | Apr 12, 2012

Who would have thought that the man behind such wackadoo fantasies as The Professional and The Fifth Element was capable of being so bloody boring?

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 10, 2012

Paralyzes history and human drama with relentless hagiography.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 10, 2012

The narrative of the political neophyte's extraordinary courage as one of the founders of the National League for Democracy, who endured house arrest for 15 years, is often secondary to Suu Kyi as wife and mother separated from her loved ones.

| Apr 10, 2012

If The Lady never quite blossoms in the way one might hope, it's largely because its subject has never been allowed to either.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 12, 2012