75
Metascore
41 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyThe Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyA career high point for Ralph Fiennes as both an actor and director, this unfussy and emotionally penetrating work also provides lead actress Felicity Jones with the prime role in which she abundantly fulfills the promise suggested in some of her earlier small films.
- 100VarietyScott FoundasVarietyScott FoundasSo tastefully mounted and brilliantly acted that it wears down even the corset-phobic’s innate resistance to such things.
- 80The GuardianCatherine ShoardThe GuardianCatherine ShoardThe Invisible Woman shies from propaganda just as Nelly shies from impropriety. Fiennes has done the right and proper thing here. He has, at 50, made a mature movie, prudent in the best possible sense.
- 80The TelegraphTim RobeyThe TelegraphTim RobeyAbi Morgan's script – better, for my money, than her work on either Shameor The Iron Lady – elegantly straddles two timelines to illuminate a deliberately obscured life
- 80Time OutJoshua RothkopfTime OutJoshua RothkopfThe movie deepens as Nelly, destined for the gossip columns and a peripheral attachment, becomes painfully aware of her own fragility (Jones’s performance is devastating).
- 78Film.comWilliam GossFilm.comWilliam GossFiennes and writer Abi Morgan mercifully forsake the gee-golly traditions of similar fame-minded fare...in constructing a narrative as emotionally repressed as its subjects must have been, with each character existing within their own arena of personal and social compromise.
- 75ObserverRex ReedObserverRex ReedMr. Fiennes admirably humanizes the characters while exploring their contradictions and emphasizing their feelings. But his no-frills direction is a bit stodgy for my taste, and although this is not the Dickens you’d ever pay to hear read "Little Dorrit," there’s more vitality in his performance than the film itself.
- 67The PlaylistChris WillmanThe PlaylistChris Willman[Fiennes] has rarely been better than he is as the 19th century’s most celebrated novelist, with his chops on screen just about matched by what he’s done behind.
- 50Slant MagazineAndrew SchenkerSlant MagazineAndrew SchenkerRalph Fiennes's film feels not so much rooted in the past as it is mired in conventions about how to portray that past.