Recencies van critici

By keeping the film’s emotional core at a distance for most of the film, the only catharsis the audience feels during its denouement is from the relief that this bleak, miserable slog is finally over.

This is three movies in one, each of which is progressively worse... At under two hours, this movie is an unwatchable, punishing hot mess that doesn’t earn its last scene of catharsis. You can’t feel any relief if you just don’t care.

Maybe compressing a TV series down into cinema is the greatest crime here; The Unforgivable’s countless structural problems make that case without even trying... Self-containment is key, and The Unforgivable can’t contain itself.

The screenplay, adapted by Peter Craig, Hillary Seitz and Courtenay Miles from a British mini-series, gifts Bullock a few big screaming scenes but mostly has her slouching around silently while it dithers over whether or not to root for Ruth to rebuild her life.

The Unforgivable lacks anything resembling narrative tension... Despite a deep ensemble led by a transformative Bullock, [the film] moves at a turgid pace, lacking the urgency and pathos required in a redemption narrative with any hopes that the audience will pull for its damaged protagonist.

Because Fingscheidt has gathered such a strong cast, and taken such pains to delineate between each world, we feel as though every disparate thread deserves its own time. Instead, most of the characters get short shrift, and powerful actors who might normally serve as anchors — Morgan, Davis, and Bernthal in particular — are reduced to memorable cameos.

A strange, broken film which never ties its story satisfactorily together: actors in the supporting cast come and go according to curious screenwriting whims that leave us scratching our heads. It’s never outright bad – not unforgivably so – but comes off muted, diffuse and generally half-baked.

The Unforgivable whiffs on a high-concept gimmick that could have been dirty fun in the right hands... [But] there’s no sense in [the film] of the chaos of someone being thrown into a new life. No scene is surprising, as all are devoid of textures and emotions that don’t readily affirm the film’s rigid worldview of redemption.

Everything’s so flatly emphatic that each story beat feels mechanistic... The whole thing comes across as a movie star’s anti-vanity project, just an opportunity for Bullock to demonstrate her ostensible range. Okay, she can be hard and stoic and affectless. Noted.

Sandra Bullock earnestly portrays the emotionally scarred protagonist seeking to reconnect with her much-younger sister, but... Unforgiven never settles on one compelling tone, wandering into unconvincing, pulpier terrain in its second half.

The plot’s twists and turns, which were manageable in a three-part TV drama, look contrived and unlikely in a feature film and Bullock has little to do but look self-consciously solemn and martyred for the entirety of it.

“The Unforgivable” could have been a beat-for-beat remake of the original without any significant difference to its budget or distribution, and yet the final product often feels like watching someone try to squeeze “Crime and Punishment” into the length of an Instagram story.