50
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
Precious little is revealed and one is left with the feeling that the material needed a different kind of treatment to illuminate its protagonists.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
The film frequently falls back on the stately demeanor of countless other historical biopics and period pieces. Read our review.
30
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
Vita & Virginia takes a passionate, real-life affair between two enormously gifted writers and proceeds to throttle the life out of it.
60
As Vita & Virginia loses its girlishness, drawn like the tides to the solemn maturity of Debicki’s performance. With her as the lodestar, this is a stranger and more intriguing film than it really has a right to be, one that becomes less about a clandestine courtship between famous women, and more about Woolf’s relationship with her writing, and with the workings of her own beautiful, restless mind.
40
Vita and Virginia is a remarkably chaste and safe film given its wealthy subject matter.
50
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
Once Sackville-West gets bored with Woolf and starts seeing another woman, garden-variety jealousy takes over. Not quite as fascinating as the story of a man who inexplicably metamorphoses into a woman and doesn’t age for 300 years.
60
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The drama – featuring the kind of flat, chirruping upper-middle-class English accents that aren’t usually voiced on screen – is intriguing and uncompromisingly high-minded, right on the laugh-with/laugh-at borderline, but interestingly unafraid of mockery.
75
It is a film of (somewhat) mutual admiration and clever, clever words, the product of “a wickedly brilliant mind” (Woolf) and a popular poettess and wit, descended from Gypsies (Isabella Rosellini plays Vita’s disapproving Gypsy grande dame mother), a “a sapphist” with scandalous appetites.
40
The Observer (UK) by Simran Hans
Debicki (The Tale, Widows) is wonderful as Woolf, a wry and solemn observer, but the rest of the film is all too literal.
40
Even Arterton at smouldering full wattage can do little to hold together a picture in which the chemistry between the two leads is non-existent and many of the directorial choices are decidedly odd.