Critic Reviews
93
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
positive
16(94%)
mixed
1(6%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 17 Critic Reviews
100
For the most part, this is a very close adaptation of Booth Tarkington's underrated novel about the relentless decline of a wealthy midwestern family through the rise of industrialization, though Welles makes the story even more powerful through his extraordinary mise en scene and some of the finest acting to be found in American movies.
100
A masterpiece in every way.
100
An elegiac saga of the decline and fall of a rich small-town American family, based on a Booth Tarkington novel.
100
With immaculate period reconstruction, and virtuoso acting shot in long, elegant takes, it remains the director's most moving film, despite the artificiality of the sentimental tacked-on ending.
100
The Magnificent Ambersons is still masterly. It’s the movie that all other films about families in decline are measured against.
100
It's a tragedy that someone else' happy ending is tacked onto his tale, but the film retains enough brilliance to make us glad it's been re-released.
100
The film as it stands is a vision of a lost world of graces and traditions that are as alluring as they are confining, as beautiful as they are useless—as well as a portrait of the makers and the victims of modernity.
100
Welles's second great masterpiece.
90
The film wasn’t completed in the form that Welles originally intended, and there are pictorial effects that seem scaled for a much fuller work, but even in this truncated form it’s amazing and memorable.
90
The Magnificent Ambersons is a pretty sensational movie. The film language is more fluid and adept than Kane‘s, the expressionist lighting is more rigorously modulated.
