30
The New Yorker by Anthony Lane
It’s when Landais departs from the original, or has a bright idea for expanding on it, that the movie’s troubles begin.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
30
Arizona Republic by Barbara VanDenburgh
Landais certainly brought little cinematic verve to The Aspern Papers, telling the story largely in turgid literary voiceover lifted directly from the original source material.
25
San Francisco Chronicle by David Lewis
The movie is made even worse with embarrassing flashbacks, painful voiceover, and inane dream sequences. It’s like a Merchant-Ivory film – on Quaaludes.
38
Although he’s playing a man of letters, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers swans around the film’s settings with a pout that suggests that he’s waiting for his cue to sing “Please allow me to introduce myself.”
20
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
Passion is spoken of and clumsily envisioned in The Aspern Papers, but not a drop of it is felt.
12
Slant Magazine by Keith Watson
The words of Henry James have never sounded as leaden and preposterous as they do in Julien Landais’s The Aspern Papers.
40
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
Landais has made a version of Aspern that is too often uncertain and unconvincing despite the good work of his female stars. And when the actresses leave the screen and the film ventures into ill-advised flashback territory, things get shakier still.
30
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
Too bad that the best that can be said about the woeful movie version of the The Aspern Papers, based on the Henry James novella, is that it might send you running to the original.
50
Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan
The film is smart, literary, nuanced, slightly stagy — and pedigreed to within an inch of its life. It practically reeks of dusty, yellowed pages and engraved-leather bookbinding.
50
The Seattle Times by Moira Macdonald
The Aspern Papers, brief as it is, needed more of a lightness of touch; if you weigh down melodrama too much, it dies.