Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Bill White

Meirelles adds another perspective, that the epidemic might be a good thing if, by being thrown into the darkness together, we may once again recognize the human family to which we all belong.

Austin Chronicle by Kimberley Jones

It's a rattling, heartrending performance (Moore) in, yes, a long, hard slough of a film – one that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

It engaged me throughout and I found the ending to be surprisingly hopeful.

San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

At times almost unbearably ugly, but by the time you walk out of the theater, you know you've seen something.

Portland Oregonian by Stan Hall

Visually nervy, beautifully acted, intense and philosophically compelling, it struggles to connect emotionally as it wrestles with the challenging source material.

Boston Globe by Wesley Morris

A perversely enjoyable, occasionally harrowing adaptation of José Saramago's 1995 disaster allegory.

New York Post by Kyle Smith

I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Liam Lacey

It's more like a filmed allegory.

NPR by Bob Mondello

Moore is always watchable, Ruffalo and Bernal get a nice rivalry going without ever establishing eye contact (as it were), and Danny Glover has some nice moments in an underdeveloped part as an older man who finds, to his benefit, that love is blind.

Empire by Staff (Not Credited)

Handicapped by pretensions to making big statements, Blindness is still gripping, disturbing and intermittently powerful.

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

As the players enact the fall and rebirth of civilization, Meirelles suggests that even a society gone to hell looks better with a little music-video-like pizzazz.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips

This film is very different: chilly, methodical, a slave to 10-ton metaphor as opposed to metaphoric provocation.

Variety by Justin Chang

Meirelles' slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago's prose.

The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Honeycutt

Blindness is provocative cinema. But it also is predictable cinema: It startles but does not surprise.

Village Voice

Unflinching at best and treacly at worst, the film unveils its apocalyptic scenario with visceral intensity, but lacks the emotional sophistication to rise above schadenfreude kicks.

The New Yorker by Anthony Lane

The trouble with Blindness is that it’s so preoccupied with shouldering this symbolic weight that it gradually forgets to tell a story--to keep faith with the directives of common sense.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen.