The White Countess goes on so long I felt the urge to consult my calendar.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Oct 7, 2018

Ishiguro is a wonderful novelist, but perhaps not a natural-born screenwriter. The White Countess feels schematic and dramatically inert. Ivory, for all the acting talent at his disposal, finds plenty of style in prewar Shanghai, but its pulse eludes him.

| Mar 13, 2018

While a beautiful and moving film, The White Countess, sadly falls short of being a great one because it never allows us into the hearts of its primary protagonists.

| Original Score: 5/11 | Feb 28, 2008

[Ivory] takes a tired, cliché-ridden, nostalgic screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro and layers on the ennui.

| Mar 1, 2007

Esteticamente impecável (como todas as produções Merchant Ivory), o filme falha do ponto de vista narrativo, revelando-se, como seus personagens, excessivamente frio e emocionalmente distante.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 31, 2006

James Ivory has cast Britain's acting aristocracy to play post-Revolution Russian aristocracy, which brings much gravitas and many subtle performance highs to this drawn out story set in 1936/7 Shanghai.

| Apr 22, 2006

It has an emotional payoff. It isn't much, but by Merchant-Ivory standards it is an orgasm of raw emotion.

| Original Score: C+ | Apr 19, 2006

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2006

Though [Merchant-Ivory] hadn't made a first-rate film since The Remains of the Day in 1993, there was always a chance they'd hit one last pitch out of the park. The White Countess, their final pairing, is just a bloop single.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 24, 2006

One of the great partnerships in movies ends not with a bang or even a whimper, but with a stifled yawn.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 23, 2006

A middling example of the sort of tony projects upon which [Merchant and Ivory] built their reputations.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 22, 2006

A beautiful movie with an intriguing central theme and cast that is far easier to admire than to actually like.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 22, 2006

A little judicious editing might have made it more effective.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 17, 2006

James Ivory would have done well to take his from "Casablanca" since that similarly themed film achieves everything that this film aspires to but ultimately fails at.

| Original Score: D+ | Feb 17, 2006

A little too emotionally repressed to suit its melodrama -- imagine Casablanca with Paul Henried miscast in the Bogart role.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 17, 2006

The White Countess is the last Merchant-Ivory and embodies most of the virtues of the brand ...

Full Review | Original Score: 87/100 | Feb 17, 2006

A worthy final collaboration from James Ivory and his late partner, Ismail Merchant.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 17, 2006

By sheer willpower (and some of the best art direction of this year or any other), this is a fitting, poetic epitaph to the life and career of Ismail Merchant.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 11, 2006

Merchant Ivory places its final, famous imprimatur on a worthy film.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Feb 10, 2006

The symbolism of the situation -- a blind diplomat trying, and once again failing, to stage-manage international harmony -- seems like something from a socially conscious play of the 1930s.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 10, 2006