Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in Chicago, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
Sylvia (2003)
Director: Christine Jeffs
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
A handsome, mostly tasteful production on a par with 2001’s Bayley-Murdoch impersonation Iris, Sylvia is still ridden with all the ankle-spraining lawn divots of the biopic: clumpy composite characters, the collapsed chronology and the expository ventriloquism. Not for nothing has the daughter of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes excoriated this production in verse as propping up a ‘Sylvia Suicide Doll’. But Paltrow is no marionette, and her performance stitches a fascinating double bind of Plath’s sunny all-American exterior and her stormcloud inner voices. As Hughes, Craig radiates the fabled enormous erotic puissance, and the film rather admirably leaves him as a stone-bust enigma. Only a casual knowledge of this doomed literary marriage, however, will obviate the movie’s various re-enactments.Author: JWin
Cast & crew
Director: Christine Jeffs
Producer: Alison Owen
Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Amira Casar, Andrew Havill, Sam Troughton, Lucy Davenport, Antony Strachan, Blythe Danner, Michael Gambon, David Birkin full cast
Duration: 114 mins
Most popular on this site
Features
Gray's anatomy
James Gray wants to push buttons—again.
The next big thing?
Gigantic Releasing tries to rethink indie distribution…without movie theaters.
Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova, First Lady of Soviet Cinema
So you think you can dance, comrade?
Puppet master
Coraline director Henry Selick takes stop-motion animation into 3-D.
Socratic method
Laurent Cantet's approach on the set matches the message of his film.
Wander woman
Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy puts a Bush-era spin on the road movie.
Oscars
Read our interviews with the nominees, our reviews of the nominated films and more.
What do you think?
Post your review now