Possession

LaBute, in his infinite and marvelous wrongness, infuses his movie with a delicacy of feeling that couldn't be more right for the material. LaBute obviously approached the project with his hands and his heart open: Frame by frame, it's a humble picture, a movie that isn't afraid to be an entertainment.Read Full Review »

LaBute likes people who think themselves into and out of love, and finds the truly passionate (like Blanche) to be the most dangerous. He likes romances that exist out of sight, denied, speculated about, suspected, fought against.Read Full Review »

Maud and Roland's search for an unknowable past makes for a haunting literary detective story, but LaBute pulls off a neater trick in Possession: He makes language sexy.Read Full Review »

Compelling material, especially for those who believe that the lives and loves of the dead can impact the trajectory of the existences of the living.Read Full Review »

A wee, breezy thing with painterly cinematography (by Jean Yves Escoffier) and with actors who are mostly fun to watch. It sails by in 103 minutes and the clunky stuff isn't painful, which makes a change from LaBute's usual grueling studies in human callousness and depravity.Read Full Review »

When Possession finds its true home, lodging in the convulsive certitude of Victorian romance, it does indeed catch fire -- and warms any viewer in the mood for love.Read Full Review »

Possession is in the end an honorable, interesting failure. It falls far short of poetry, but it's not bad prose.Read Full Review »

The movie is intelligent yet lifeless; it's all wisps and abstractions.Read Full Review »

The real problem isn't with the actors, it's with 1) the source material, a highfalutin romance novel with a clever literary conceit, and 2) LaBute's clumsy, uncomfortable efforts to telescope Byatt's book into a workable movie.Read Full Review »

Possession suffers from insufficient nastiness.Read Full Review »