Click here to copy URL

Ryan's Daughter

1970

David Lean

Sarah Miles, Robert Mitchum, Christopher Jones, Trevor Howard ...

7.8

6,516

Drama. Romance Set during the Irish Rebellion of 1916, it tells the story of Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum), a kind and gentle widower, who falls in love with and marries the much younger Rosy (Sarah Miles). On her wedding night, however, Rosy finds that her new husband does not make her romantic dreams come true. When a handsome young Major arrives to take over England's occupying forces, he and Rosy feel an immediate sexual attraction to each ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"Lean's characters, well written and well acted, are finally dwarfed by his excessive scale (...) The distance between the subject and the style eventually proves fatal to 'Ryan's Daughter' (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 4)"	NEU
United States	Vincent Canby The New York Times	"Lean is one of the great technicians of the movies (...) It is, by design, canny and shrewd (...) It aims at a gut reaction that is not intrinsically deplorable, but is really rather self-indulgent."	NEU
United States	Dave Kehr Chicago Reader	"It's insanely overproduced (...) yet somehow the crazy mismatches in scale contribute to the film's sense of romantic delirium."	NEU
United Kingdom	Ian Nathan Empire	"It is too keenly felt, lacking the subtlety and character of his previous work (...) Melodramatic but still quite moving in places depending on your mood (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	NEU
United Kingdom	Tom Milne Time Out	"An awe-inspiringly tedious lump of soggy romanticism (...) Banal, utterly predictable, ludicrously overblown"	NEG
United States	Variety	"'Ryan's Daughter' is a brilliant enigma (...) [The] overlength of perhaps 30 minutes serves to magnify some weaknesses of Robert Bolt's original screenplay"	NEU
United Kingdom	Kevin Maher The Times	"A weary 'Madame Bovary' rehash (...) [There is] a palpable lack of chemistry between Miles and Jones (…) Rating: ★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United States	Donna Bowman AV Club	"A strangely compelling mix of the old and the new, peppered with awe-inspiring scenery"	POS
United Kingdom	Adrian Turner Radio Times	"Now looks like a masterwork, thanks in no small part to Freddie Young's Oscar-winning images of the wild Dingle Peninsula (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
Ireland	Irish Times	"By modern standards, the film is a dinosaur – magnificent but unviable."	NEU

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.