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

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 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

A tale well told, a look at history in the making and those being shaken in the process.

| Original Score: B | Feb 3, 2006

A tedious, overblown bit of business.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 3, 2006

The White Countess, although it has its share of Masterpiece Theatre moments, is another film to remind us just how cosmopolitan is the Merchant-Ivory filmography.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 27, 2006

Despite its brilliant evocation of this great city at this most provocative time in history, the movie just gets sillier and sillier.

| Jan 20, 2006

A rewarding close to the Merchant Ivory oeuvre.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 20, 2006

So powerful is Fiennes that his performance carries the last act of an overlong film that is not as shapely as we've come to expect from Merchant and Ivory.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 19, 2006

Political intrigue, the thriving jazz-era nightclub scene and the breakdown of the class system within a city in turmoil should have yielded more engaging scenarios.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 14, 2006

The White Countess is never less than lovely to look at, and sometimes much more.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 13, 2006

This is Merchant-Ivory's kind of showmanship, the unflashy adult variety of movie magic that they made their hallmark.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 13, 2006

This last Merchant/Ivory film feels like a thin apparition of the team's best films -- similarly static but less substantial, less palpable, and sadly less respectable, just the vestigial remains of a better day.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 13, 2006

Sumptuous to look at, tastefully dull, and ultimately rather silly, it whisks us to a far-off land -- the Shanghai expatriate community on the eve of World War II -- and strands us among cooked-up characters and emotions.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 13, 2006

As the last film from the legendary team of Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, who died in May, The White Countess is a stirring tribute to Merchant, a true builder of dreams in an industry now sorely bereft of his unique spirit.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 6, 2006

It's a pleasure to report that their swan song, written by Kazuo Ishiguro, is a gilded-canvas work of graceful and touching skill.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 4, 2006

The more I thought about it the more I appreciated the artistry and the intelligence behind this film.

Full Review | Dec 29, 2005

Where Shanghai should teem, it merely ambles.

Full Review | Dec 22, 2005

Fiennes's performance, tricky and impassioned, is the showpiece.

| Original Score: B | Dec 21, 2005