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Effie Gray

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United Kingdom · 2014
Rated PG-13 · 1h 25m
Director Richard Laxton
Starring Emma Thompson, Dakota Fanning, Greg Wise, Tom Sturridge
Genre Drama

Based on the real-life scandal that shocked Victorian-era England, this film tells the story of Effie Gray. At nineteen, she married the prominent art historian John Ruskin, who refused to consummate their marriage. Lonely and frustrated, Effie is drawn to the pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, a friend of Ruskin's. A love triangle soon emerges.

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What are critics saying?

60

Total Film by

Richard Laxton’s painterly film combines the gothic shadows of Hitchcock’s Rebecca with the gut-wrenching romance of A Royal Affair. The result is dark and offbeat, but as a murky anti-romance, Gray is undeniably effective.

60

Time Out London by Cath Clarke

It’s a thoughtful, well-acted and perceptive drama. However, for a film about a love triangle the sparks don’t exactly fly.

40

Time Out by David Ehrlich

So while the film clearly wants to be an affirmation of female agency, it plays instead like nothing more than the story of a girl who marries an ogre and waits to be freed by true love’s kiss.

50

Variety by Guy Lodge

This admirable, watercolor-delicate tale of individual feminist emancipation never quite blooms into living color, hampered by spotty casting and Richard Laxton’s overly deliberate direction.

88

Slant Magazine by Matt Brennan

It spins the narrative of one of the Victorian art world's most mysterious marriages into a study of life lived and life merely examined, a fecund fairy tale in reverse.

60

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

It’s a little hammy and soapy, with an occasional Pythonesque sense of its own importance but this film, directed by Richard Laxton, is performed with gusto.

50

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

Whatever “it” is, that spark that film actresses and actors have that makes them interesting and empathetic and anything else on the screen, Fanning doesn’t have it.

60

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

There are clever and sensitive touches right through, and a moving ending. But Fanning seems wholly uncomfortable, and not always intentionally.

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