The Invisible Woman
Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: December 25, 2013 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
75
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 41 Critic Reviews
Positive:
35
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranDec 24, 2013
The Invisible Woman is an exceptional film about love, longing and regret. It's further proof, if proof were needed, that classic filmmaking done with passion, sensitivity and intelligence results in cinema fully capable of blowing you away. Read full review
100
VarietyScott FoundasSep 16, 2013
So tastefully mounted and brilliantly acted that it wears down even the corset-phobic’s innate resistance to such things. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthySep 15, 2013
A 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. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinJan 13, 2014
With her swanlike neck and ever-flushing complexion, Felicity Jones has a perfect nineteenth-century look, but there’s something forward and modern about her physiognomy, her huge eyes and strong nose and overbite. As she gazes down in enforced modesty, you feel her soul about to burst. The performance is startlingly vivid. Read full review
90
Village VoiceNick SchagerDec 24, 2013
The Invisible Woman finds Ralph Fiennes proving as adept behind the camera as he is in front of it. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comGodfrey CheshireDec 25, 2013
The film represents a formidable achievement for Fiennes as both actor and director. Read full review
88
USA TodayClaudia PuigDec 24, 2013
A meticulously rendered, tasteful and moving period drama. Read full review
80
Time Out LondonDave CalhounFeb 4, 2014
The Invisible Woman is only partly a romance; it’s the tragedy of Nelly’s life that makes itself more powerfully heard. Read full review
80
EmpireAngie ErrigoFeb 3, 2014
One for lovers of ravishing craft, although the elusive emotional engagement is frustrating. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzJan 9, 2014
The performances are outstanding. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternDec 28, 2013
The Invisible Woman gives us a plausible image of the great man in the fullness of his celebrity, and an affecting portrait of the woman who lived much of her life in his shadow. Read full review
80
The New York TimesStephen HoldenDec 24, 2013
You may become impatient with the leisurely pace of The Invisible Woman and its occasional narrative vagueness, but its open spaces leave room for some of the strongest acting of any contemporary film. Read full review
80
Time OutJoshua RothkopfDec 18, 2013
The 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). Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeySep 15, 2013
Abi 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 Read full review
80
The GuardianCatherine ShoardSep 15, 2013
The 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. Read full review
78
Film.comWilliam GossSep 15, 2013
Fiennes 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. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJan 23, 2014
Felicity Jones gives a fierce and moving performance as Nelly. Read full review
75
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanJan 23, 2014
Fiennes isn’t naturally an outgoing performer, and he’s playing the most extroverted author in English history. So he does his best work in intimate moments, when Dickens finds himself at a loss for words. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJan 23, 2014
Even if you don't entirely buy this version of events, director Ralph Fiennes has given us a speculation that works as drama. It's an elegant bit of goods. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaJan 17, 2014
Jones (Like Crazy) gives Nelly's tragic plight a palpable anguish. There is no doubt that Dickens - who was mad about theater, about acting, about inhabiting other lives onstage and in the pages of his books - was in love with Nelly. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyJan 16, 2014
The Invisible Woman is, fair warning, leisurely in its pace. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayJan 16, 2014
The Invisible Woman is less a conventional love story than a wise, often troubling contemplation of myriad modern impulses, from the lure of celebrity and public acclaim to the compartmentalizing of identity and the gender politics of Great Man-ism. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrJan 16, 2014
Beneath the period décor and lamp-lit elegance, this is a story of a profound emotional crime prompted by profound love. Read full review
75
Miami HeraldConnie OgleJan 16, 2014
The Invisible Woman offers a compelling glimpse at a life once hidden. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliJan 15, 2014
One of the singular pleasures of films like The Invisible Woman is the window they offer into the lives of deceased authors who are known primarily to modern audiences only through the words they committed to paper. Read full review
75
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreJan 14, 2014
Fiennes holds it all together by force of what he does show us about the man, his kindness tempered with cruelty, the charity he practiced and preached, the morality he could never live up to. It’s the visible great man who makes The Invisible Woman worth watching. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerJan 10, 2014
The Invisible Woman at its best does justice to the complicatedness of its characters – just as Dickens did as a writer. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleJan 9, 2014
Very good at pointing out the social difficulties surrounding the Dickens-Ternan relationship, the power dynamics within it and the lasting effects of it. Read full review
75
ObserverRex ReedDec 17, 2013
Mr. 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. Read full review
75
IndieWireEric KohnSep 15, 2013
Though suffering from dry patches and a fairly mannered approach, The Invisible Woman eventually makes its way to a powerful final third documenting an ultimately tragic romance in deeply felt terms. Read full review
70
TimeRichard CorlissDec 25, 2013
A delicate counterpoise of passion and restraint, The Invisible Woman is a major work in a minor key. Read full review
70
The DissolveKeith PhippsDec 22, 2013
Jones delivers a quietly wrenching performance as a woman who comes to recognize too late how much of herself she’s lost. It’s subtle work in a film that is sometimes content to be a little too subtle. Read full review
67
Portland OregonianMarc MohanJan 23, 2014
Fiennes and screenwriter Abi Morgan deserve credit for crafting something more nuanced than a mere scandal-airing demonization. Read full review
67
The PlaylistChris WillmanSep 15, 2013
[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. Read full review
63
New York PostFarran Smith NehmeDec 24, 2013
By refusing to consider that Dickens and Ternan ever brought each other any happiness, the movie is more Victorian in its attitudes than even some Victorians were. Read full review
60
The New YorkerDavid DenbyJan 6, 2014
Fiennes and his team have mounted a handsome re-creation of Victorian England, but the Dickens-Ternan affair isn't much of a story -- at least, not as realized here. [6 Jan. 2014, p.73]
60
New York Daily NewsElizabeth WeitzmanDec 24, 2013
Directed tastefully by Ralph Fiennes, The Invisible Woman is very lovely to look at. But it lives up to its own title too well. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloDec 24, 2013
Handsome and intelligent, it’s nonetheless a tepid portrait of a relationship that would be unremarkable were the gentleman not Dickens. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineAndrew SchenkerOct 10, 2013
Ralph Fiennes's film feels not so much rooted in the past as it is mired in conventions about how to portray that past. Read full review
40
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottJan 24, 2014
There must also be a spark, a sense of life, a compelling reason for being. If a film doesn't have those -- which The Invisible Woman doesn't -- well, it might as well be invisible. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleSteve DavisJan 22, 2014
It’s the subtext of 19th century gender politics that keeps this footnote in Dickens’ life mildly interesting, but it’s a not much upon which to rest an entire movie. Read full review
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