60
Thoughtful, emotional and often surprisingly funny, Terence Davies offers a rich if inconsistent portrait of a unique poet long deserving of a big-screen study.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
It is Davies’ ability to invest even the most apparently-humdrum moments with some form of intense radiance that sustains his film.
100
Time Out London by Dave Calhoun
The talk is pointed and careful in a household that savours the power and meaning of words, but it’s as much the imagery that makes this film such a painterly joy.
60
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
Despite a warmly interacting cast that includes Jennifer Ehle as Emily’s sister and Keith Carradine as her lion-maned, lionized father, and a valiant effort on the part of Nixon and Davies to externalize the poet’s inner demons in emotional, high-tension scenes, the film can’t escape an underlying static quality that extinguishes the flame before it can get burning.
40
[Davies'] most mannered and least fulfilling work to date, A Quiet Passion boasts meticulous craft and ornate verbiage in abundance, but confines Cynthia Nixon’s melancholia-stricken performance as arguably America’s greatest poet in an emotional straitjacket of variously arch storytelling tones.
42
It's an overwrought, stagey muddle that suggests that Davies, ever a-quiver on the extreme high end of the sensitivity meter anyway, has quivered right off it and plunged into the depths of bathos.
70
Screen International by Lee Marshall
If A Quiet Passion grows in stature as we watch, it’s partly thanks to Cynthia Nixon, whose account of a witty, intelligent, rebellious but also reticent and emotionally confused woman takes the edge off Davies’ sometimes grating formalism.
60
While Davies vividly captures the period's austerity and Dickinson's despair at being misunderstood, there are a few too many scenes of repressed emotion followed by wild outbursts of grief.