40
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.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
40
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.
60
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.
75
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
It engaged me throughout and I found the ending to be surprisingly hopeful.
50
Meirelles' slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago's prose.
78
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.
50
The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Honeycutt
Blindness is provocative cinema. But it also is predictable cinema: It startles but does not surprise.
58
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.
50
Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips
This film is very different: chilly, methodical, a slave to 10-ton metaphor as opposed to metaphoric provocation.
38
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen.