The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young

Mary Shelley is a luscious-looking spectacle, drenched in the colors and visceral sensations of nature, the sensuality of young lovers, the passionate disappointment of loss and betrayal. But above all it is a film about ideas that breaks out of the well-worn mold of period drama (partly, anyway) by reaching deeply into the mind of the extraordinary woman who wrote the Gothic evergreen Frankenstein.

Boston Globe by Ty Burr

If Mary Shelley disappoints, it’s only because al-Mansour sticks to the tried and true bones of the bio-pic genre and plays it stylistically safe. Maybe the filmmaker hopes to prove her skill with a big-budget period piece; if so, she easily succeeds.

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

Mary Shelley is in essence “Becoming Frankenstein,” the story of how a British teen had the education, talent, life experience and literary ambitions thanks to the salon she was a part of, to create one of the seminal novels in the history of horror.

Screen Daily by Allan Hunter

Mary Shelley is ultimately the story of a woman finding her own voice and asserting her independence and that will be the heart of its appeal.

Screen International by Allan Hunter

Mary Shelley is ultimately the story of a woman finding her own voice and asserting her independence and that will be the heart of its appeal.

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

This account is plausible and moving, at once a defense of genre fiction and of female creativity. But at times the differences between male and female writers can seem a bit schematic, in a way that undermines Mary’s intellectual autonomy.

The Guardian by Benjamin Lee

Shelley’s mistreatment by the literary elite because of her gender is a compelling, uniquely frustrating element and the film deprives us of the suitably grand exploration that it deserves.

Empire by Dan Jolin

A disappointingly straightforward, romance-driven take on a fascinating story of creation, but one that’s lifted by a superb central performance by Elle Fanning.

Los Angeles Times by Katie Walsh

The film celebrates Mary Shelley for the trailblazing woman that she is, but hews far too close to convention to truly represent her life.

IGN by Witney Seibold

Mary Shelley's fascinating life story is told to contain a few brief glimpses of modern insight, but ultimately weakens under its over-use of conventional, romantic storytelling tropes.

Slant Magazine by Jake Cole

In its final act, the film abandons its fruitful investigation of belief systems in favor of a simplistic articulation of Mary's inspiration.

Variety by Andrew Barker

Impressively shot and suffused with a righteous feminist fire, the film is undercut by a confused and clunky script and a fundamental lack of thematic focus, turning an extraordinary story into didactic and disjointed melodrama.

IndieWire by Kate Erbland

For a film that chronicles the rise of a creator obsessed with reanimating the dead, Mary Shelley is utterly lifeless. It contains a sparkling and startlingly raw performance by Elle Fanning, but Haifaa Al-Mansour’s disappointing followup to her remarkable “Wadjda” doesn’t push beyond paint-by-numbers biopic posturing

The Film Stage by Christopher Schobert

If we spent a little less time on Mary and Percy, and a bit more watching Mary actually create, the result may have been different. Sadly, Mary Shelley is just not alive.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by Emily Yoshida

This is clearly all fantastic material for a film, but the problems begin with the woeful miscasting of Elle Fanning as the title character, and continue from there.

CineVue by Christopher Machell

Mary Shelley is a film at relentless pains to tell us how poetic and ethereal its heroine is, but without remotely grasping the political and philosophical underpinnings of her work.

The Playlist by Kevin Jagernauth

A film desperately in need of an electric charge, Mary Shelley is simply another cinematic corpse on the table.