The Constant Gardener

After a summer of mostly second-rate movies, the fall movie season gets off to an early start today (Wednesday) with the release of the movie version of John le Carr?'s The Constant Gardener, directed by Fernando Meirelles and starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post praises it as an adult pleasure: Never cheap, wise in the ways of the heart, able to keep a number of balls in the air without letting them blur into incoherence, evocative of a hellish, desperately damaged place and gripping as a pinched nerve. Equally enthusiastic is Claudia Puig in USA Today, who writes that the film is a masterwork of suspense, romance and political intrigue. It is a taut and gripping thriller that dazzles the eyes and engages the brain in a way that few recent films have come close to approaching. A. O. Scott comments in the New York Times: This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience. Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News calls it: a slick, fast-paced production with first-rate performances and an emotional punch you won't soon forget. Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun begins his review this way: A thriller from the inside out, a romance from the outside in: that's the double-edged brilliance of The Constant Gardener. And Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times ends his this way: This is one of the year's best films. But Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe and Mail begs to differ, writing: Yes, the cast is certainly seductive, and the direction often beguiling, yet ultimately we're left with a distinct sense of abandonment, of a story insufficiently told. That's because there's too much to tell, too much material squeezed into a two-hour running time. So the fault lies in the scope -- it's a rare film, these days, that suffers from a surfeit of ambition.