...a very authentically felt and still-uncomfortable topic from such a saddening standpoint.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 18, 2024

Charlie [is] played brilliantly by Brendan Fraser...

| Jun 2, 2023

There’s nothing consciously sinister about THE WHALE’s use of Charlie’s eating disorder (the original play was, in fact, written from experience), but Aronofsky’s adaptation is cruel, not just to Charlie’s character, but to all of them.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 21, 2023

It’s such a heavy-handed approach that The Whale’s extremity risks alienating the audience from the intention.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 6, 2023

The Whale is a moving, enveloping film that, while it very rarely departs from its stage origins, reaches the heights of emotional drama.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 4, 2023

The pace is so repetitive, and Charlie’s small cast of visitors keep bursting through the front door so regularly, that his sitting room comes to resemble a bus depot at peak hour.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2023

Ultimately, it alludes to things without adding up to much of anything. Still, the performances are all excellent, and Fraser is especially compelling, bringing a sincerity to Charlie, and an openness and gentleness.

| Feb 2, 2023

The film needs empathy for Charlie to have a genuine reason for being. But Aronofsky sees his characters the way certain children look at spiders. Which leg first?

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 2, 2023

Deals in the worst, most jaded conventions of bourgeois middlebrow dinner theatre from the 1950s ... Not even someone so warm as Fraser can win us over to the most jaw-droppingly daft final shot in recent cinema.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 2, 2023

The Whale is best appreciated as a moving, stripped-back character study, with a stunning lead performance.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 30, 2023

Brendan Fraser, cherished for his earlier roles as an endearing naïve, performs miracles in making Charlie likeable... Enduring such an awful play is a high price to pay to see some acting, though.

| Jan 27, 2023

Fraser delivers the best work of his career.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 23, 2022

Fraser's choices are so subtly intelligent that we barely notice what amounts to his costume, so attuned are we to the way his Charlie teeters on the brink of life and death.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 23, 2022

The Whale is not a cruel spectacle – it is just a dull, repetitive one.

| Dec 21, 2022

Aronofsky has proven he can direct, so what to make of the fact that this film is so hateful and vile?

| Original Score: 0.5/4 | Dec 21, 2022

The Whale is messy and compromised, but finds its honesty in the emotional core of its lead performance. See it for Fraser, try and drown out the rest.

| Original Score: B- | Dec 20, 2022

A murky-looking, claustrophobic exercise in emotionalism at its most trite and ostentatiously maudlin.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 20, 2022

A searing, moving experience.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 20, 2022

In every scene, every moment, practically, Fraser strives for and often succeeds in finding something more than cheap pathos.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 19, 2022

Most of the conflicts in The Whale are overcooked nonsense, contrived for dramatic impact but divorced from any recognizable reality.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 19, 2022