Martin Eden

"It suffers from a lack of clear direction, leading to its many excellent pieces never quite fitting together."

"It will likely move you more than you’re expecting."

"Marcello does what he can to make Eden's inner growth cinematic, but the results are uneven."

"It's a slog at over two hours..."

"A work of art that abounds in its own beautiful contradictions."

"It’s the man behind the camera as much as the one in front of it... that gives Martin Eden such a bracing sense of vitality."

"The film is a masterpiece... see it any way you can."

"The film is a romance, of sorts, yet it also wields an anti-romantic ferocity..."

"No film could replicate the tragic weight of London's work, but this comes awfully close."

"Despite the liberties it takes with the source material, the film is dramatically and emotionally immensely satisfying."

"Yet without dumbing down its message, Marcello’s sweeping Künstlerroman has all the pleasurable characteristics of a simmering romance and a poignant tragedy, too."

"The true miracle of this film is how Marcello translates both London’s scabrous tone and his lush, character-revealing prose into pure cinema. Lines have been plucked from the novel, yet even at its wordiest, the film is never weighed down by the burden of faithfulness."

"Pietro Marcello’s film works better as a story of self-loathing and self-destruction than it does as a social critique or political statement."

"Marcello and his committed, compelling lead actor Luca Marinelli deliver an always watchable take on the hoary old story of the struggling artist that is more interesting in its shape-shifting style and texture than in its rather conventional dramatic core."

"This spry yet increasingly bitter romantic drama is so vague and un-targeted that its social critiques feel less defined than ever. The anger is palpable, but its targets are hard to pinpoint."

"The outcome is an unwieldy intellectual sprawl whose incontestable visual pleasures (much like Marcello’s “Lost and Beautiful”) distract from the shallow characterizations. ... The overarching impression is of a film too much in thrall to theory."

"Marcello never quite manages to shoehorn in both more than a century’s worth of European struggles and sociopolitical thinking and the full story of Eden’s downfall after he’s finally become successful. Indeed, these weighty concerns capsize the entire enterprise in the final stretch, where the story runs aground on an iceberg of undigested ideas, barely developed themes and bad hair choices."