Miral
Weinstein Company, The | Release Date: March 25, 2011 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
45
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 19 Critic Reviews
Positive:
3
Mixed:
14
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
67
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanMar 23, 2011
Confused? So is Miral, a film that makes bits and pieces of the Palestinian experience come alive without assembling them into a coherent vision. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeWesley MorrisMar 31, 2011
Miral feels like gastric bypass moviemaking. It's a miniseries awkwardly stuffed in the body of a two-hour drama about the Palestinians' long struggle against the Israelis. Read full review
63
USA TodayClaudia PuigMar 24, 2011
Bogged down by speechifying and a plodding pace, Miral is well-intentioned but doesn't achieve the searing emotional resonance suggested by the story. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierMar 25, 2011
Any film as politically specific as Miral needs to be addressed on two levels, as a movie and as, from a certain viewpoint, a polemic. If a viewer can separate one from the other - and some may not - there's an intense, novelistic drama here. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesSheri LindenMar 24, 2011
The lack of a compelling lead figure, combined with Schnabel's tentative approach to the material, casts the film's later stretches in the balmy glow of soap opera. Read full review
60
EmpireDavid HughesMar 21, 2011
Schnabel doesn't comes close to the quiet power of his last feature, "The Diving Bell And The Butterfly," delivering a story that can't match the scope or scale of Rula Jebreal's source material. Read full review
50
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsApr 15, 2011
The few Jewish characters are cartoonishly evil, but even the Palestinians are sketchily dramatized or, in the case of a terrorist, clumsily legitimized. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderJ.R. JonesApr 14, 2011
This story of a girl growing up in the occupied territories never finds its footing. Read full review
50
Christian Science MonitorAndy KleinMar 27, 2011
Schnabel and his collaborators get points for taking on a crucial and underrepresented viewpoint. If only the result were more compelling. Read full review
50
NPRMark JenkinsMar 25, 2011
Miral stumbles, both thematically and stylistically. The two things that undermine the director's balance? Peace and love. Read full review
50
SalonAndrew O'HehirMar 24, 2011
It isn't the shifting narrative focus of Miral that's the problem, nor is it the purposefully provocative pro-Palestinian perspective. It's Jebreal's screenplay, which uses every scene as a vehicle for delivering news headlines or condensed political rhetoric, and seems incapable of capturing a specific emotion or an individual personality. Read full review
50
The New York TimesA.O. ScottMar 24, 2011
To say that Mr. Schnabel's film is innocuous is not to say that it's any good. Like so many other well-intentioned movies about politically contentious issues, it is hobbled by its own sincerity and undone by a confused aesthetic agenda. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterDeborah YoungMar 21, 2011
Dramatically but unevenly explores the lives of four Palestinian women during the years of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Read full review
50
VarietyJustin ChangMar 21, 2011
Schnabel's signature blend of splintered storytelling and sobering humanism feels misapplied to this sweeping multigenerational saga. Read full review
40
MovielineStephanie ZacharekMar 24, 2011
So much of Abbas' dialogue consists of stiff platitudes (the script is by journalist Rula Jebreal, based on her novel of the same name); the character she's playing has been reduced to a dull, saintly figure, and not even Abbas can find a way out of that miniature prison. Read full review
40
Time OutJoshua RothkopfMar 22, 2011
A perfectly boring movie from Julian Schnabel - is it possible? Read full review
40
Village VoiceNick PinkertonMar 22, 2011
Miral is a very flat, fuddled movie, an at-odds-with-itself partisan work, its convictions diffused in a warm soak of style. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleAmy BiancolliMar 31, 2011
Rendered nearly unwatchable by overblown close-ups and an unrelenting shaky-cam. Read full review
25
New York PostKyle SmithMar 25, 2011
Combining narrative heavy-handedness with an airy disdain for the details of the situation, director Julian Schnabel gives us a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Miral. Read full review
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