“Ritchie means to be deep here, yet he’s never seemed so shallow.

“Some situations may be too tied to contemporary reality to receive a fairy-tale touch. It’s fair to say the illegal immigrant experience is one of them.

“If you’ve worked your way through every slushy, sentimental Christmas movie offered by the Hallmark Channel and are still able to keep your breakfast down, you might want to head to a theater to see this.

“Cusack … makes such a scene not showing off that he’s distracting.

“…the most cinematic elements of the novel are the weakest parts of the movie.

“…another example of a writer engaging in fictional wish fulfillment.

"There are more status symbols hanging from this family drama than a department-store tree has ornaments."

“Family dysfunction has its own language, with its own loaded rhythms and insinuating inflections, and writer-director Noah Baumbach is proving to be the movie master of just such linguistics.

There is a lot of yearning going on in Atonement, and not all of it is confined to the actors on the screen. The movie itself, adapted from the Ian McEwan novel, aches to be an Oscar-friendly romantic epic, even if its best moments are the more intimate, delicate drawing-room scenes. Keira Knightley, reteaming with

“…like being trapped in a closet with your greatest regrets.