Variety by Scott Foundas

So tastefully mounted and brilliantly acted that it wears down even the corset-phobic’s innate resistance to such things.

The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy

A career high point for Ralph Fiennes as both an actor and director, this unfussy and emotionally penetrating work also provides lead actress Felicity Jones with the prime role in which she abundantly fulfills the promise suggested in some of her earlier small films.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

The Invisible Woman is an exceptional film about love, longing and regret. It's further proof, if proof were needed, that classic filmmaking done with passion, sensitivity and intelligence results in cinema fully capable of blowing you away.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

With her swanlike neck and ever-flushing complexion, Felicity Jones has a perfect nineteenth-century look, but there’s something forward and modern about her physiognomy, her huge eyes and strong nose and overbite. As she gazes down in enforced modesty, you feel her soul about to burst. The performance is startlingly vivid.

Village Voice by Nick Schager

The Invisible Woman finds Ralph Fiennes proving as adept behind the camera as he is in front of it.

RogerEbert.com by Godfrey Cheshire

The film represents a formidable achievement for Fiennes as both actor and director.

USA Today by Claudia Puig

A meticulously rendered, tasteful and moving period drama.

Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf

The movie deepens as Nelly, destined for the gossip columns and a peripheral attachment, becomes painfully aware of her own fragility (Jones’s performance is devastating).

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

Abi Morgan's script – better, for my money, than her work on either Shameor The Iron Lady – elegantly straddles two timelines to illuminate a deliberately obscured life

The Guardian by Catherine Shoard

The Invisible Woman shies from propaganda just as Nelly shies from impropriety. Fiennes has done the right and proper thing here. He has, at 50, made a mature movie, prudent in the best possible sense.

Film.com by William Goss

Fiennes and writer Abi Morgan mercifully forsake the gee-golly traditions of similar fame-minded fare...in constructing a narrative as emotionally repressed as its subjects must have been, with each character existing within their own arena of personal and social compromise.

Observer by Rex Reed

Mr. Fiennes admirably humanizes the characters while exploring their contradictions and emphasizing their feelings. But his no-frills direction is a bit stodgy for my taste, and although this is not the Dickens you’d ever pay to hear read "Little Dorrit," there’s more vitality in his performance than the film itself.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Though suffering from dry patches and a fairly mannered approach, The Invisible Woman eventually makes its way to a powerful final third documenting an ultimately tragic romance in deeply felt terms.

The Playlist by Chris Willman

[Fiennes] has rarely been better than he is as the 19th century’s most celebrated novelist, with his chops on screen just about matched by what he’s done behind.

Slant Magazine by Andrew Schenker

Ralph Fiennes's film feels not so much rooted in the past as it is mired in conventions about how to portray that past.