Tale of 19th century New York high society in which a young lawyer falls in love with a woman separated from her husband, while he is engaged to the woman's cousin.
Mr. Scorsese has made a big, intelligent movie that functions as if it were a window on a world he had just discovered, and about which he can't wait to spread the news.
– Vincent Canby,
New York Times,
22 Jul 2006
fresh:
Spurning Masterpiece Theatre twittiness, Scorsese cuts to the primal passions of Wharton's tale.
– Peter Travers,
Rolling Stone,
22 Jul 2006
fresh:
An extraordinarily sumptuous piece of filmmaking.
– Todd McCarthy,
Variety,
22 Sep 2008
rotten:
Manages to be both personal and true to its source, though it never quite comes together.
– Jonathan Rosenbaum,
Chicago Reader,
1 Feb 2010
rotten:
I don't know any of those [prior] versions, and I wonder how (which means I doubt that) they avoided the snare that Wharton unwittingly set for her adapters, the snare that, for all his gifts, caught Scorsese.