Perry Kate Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

BeSummers Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Shounak Reza Yes, ''Vanity Fair'' is a good movie, but sadly it's not very much faithful to the novel, which is one of my favorite novels.Just see the differences: are there any similarities between the Becky of the novel and the Becky of the movie? In the novel, we start to hate Becky Sharp. Again in the novel, Becky is presented with a selfish and wicked character, a character WITHOUT a soul. But in the movie--- she has emotions and she is a good person despite her wicked dreams.If you don't read the novel but only watch the movie, then you will like this movie. In fact, I also like this movie very much, but I'm sad because of it's lack of faithfulness towards the novel.And now, the songs are truly wonderful. Take an example of ''Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal'' and ''She Walks in Beauty''. Aren't these songs wonderful? The musical effects of the film is very good.And the casting: it's excellent!!! I like the performances of all of them: Reese Witherspoon, James Purefoy, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Romola Garai, Rhys Ifans, Bob Hoskins, Gabriel Byrne, Jim Broadbent and others.In short, the whole movie is good but is not much faithful to the novel. Yes, it's faithful, but some elements in the movie truly disappointed me.

MBunge Great old books are quite a challenge to bring to the big screen because they were simply written on a different level than today's popular fiction. Vanity Fair is a great example of that.Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) is a young woman from an impoverished family who lost her mother when she was just a child. After slaving away many years at a boarding school, she finally gets a job as governess to one of those pinched English families in the early 19th century that had neither enough nobility nor enough money to be thoroughly upper class. From there Becky latches on to a rich dowager, before marrying the dowager's soldier nephew. Meanwhile, Becky's best friend Amelia (Romola Garai) is hopelessly in love with an arrogant jerk who cares little for her but whose father cares a great deal for Amelia's family fortune. When that fortune disappears, the father forbids the marriage to Amelia but the son goes through with it anyway, for no apparent reason. Becky and Amelia follow their husbands to Europe as the men prepare to war against Napoleon, where Becky becomes the toast of the night life of the British expeditionary force. The war ends with Amelia's husband dead and Becky and her husband trying to make a name for themselves in London society, racking up huge debts in doing so. That brings in the Marquis of Steyne (Gabriel Byrne), who sets his sights on Becky and tempts her with everything she's ever desired from life. But getting everything she ever wanted turns out to be far more than Becky can handle.There's a lot more than that in the film (and even more in the book), but that's the major problem with Vanity Fair. There's just too much story in too little time, leaving none of it with a chance to breathe. Take Reese Witherspoon's performance, for example. Her Becky is tough and determined, but the story is so busy moving her from place to place that we get no sense of her ambition and lust for status. She's called a "mountaineer" of social climbing, but most of her advancement in the first half of the film are due more to chance and circumstance than any effort of Becky's. By the time her more grasping nature has a chance to unfold on screen, it seems out of place and forced. Or take Amelia's beloved George (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). He's such a jackass it's hard to understand Amelia's devotion and then George makes decisions that are completely counter to his jackass nature without explanation. In a book, you can find the verbiage to justify or cover up stuff like that which makes little to no sense. But on screen, you just get what you can see.This is a common problem with books like Vanity Fair, which may have been pop culture in their day but played to audiences that were much smaller but much more literate than we have today. While a contemporary novel might be a cheeseburger, good but aimed at the common taste buds, Vanity Fair is more like a steak prepared by a French chef, tasty but perhaps too expensive or too much of a bother for many.The film does look great and the actors uniformly do a fine job. The best thing about the movie, however, is how it crystalizes the social and economic prison people found themselves locked inside in the early 19th century. If you didn't have money and status, your life would be nasty, brutish and usually short. I f you had money but not status, you found yourself on the outside of acceptable society trying desperately to get in. If you had status but no money, you found yourself a helpless pawn in the social gameplaying of those had money. And whatever it is that you happened to lack, there were only a very few and limited ways to try and fix that deficiency.As a work of entertainment, you're probably better off reading the book. But as an example of the structure of British society at a particular point in time, such as a teacher might use to give students a clearer understanding of those realities, Vanity Fair is worth your while.

zaisjr My girlfriend received this movie as a gift years ago. We finally got around to watching it yesterday. We both were very bored by the film and still aren't sure what the point of the film was. Here are our issues.1. The film had no identity. This seemed to be one of those films that was filmed while writing it. It never seemed to have any purpose and even the director and actors seemed to be lost as to what they expected out of this film. Based on the description on IMDb, I assumed this was your standard film about a poor woman trying to find love and success. But never does it seem that way. It appears that this movie is just about a woman with poor upbringings who is fortunate enough to often be part of rich families, bouncing from family to family, to become nothing more than who she was before.2. There is no growth in the characters, personally nor physically. The character played by Gabriel Byrne looks exactly the way he did 30+ years previously. But the big issue is that none of the characters, including the main character, seem to have much of a personal growth, epiphany, nor any substance. There is no compassion, sympathy, hatred, nor memorable features from these characters. They are far too easy to forget. There is no true hero, protagonist, nor antagonist. Anytime you do start to get to know a character, they take off and leave the film for a moment. Often without explanation.3. The film isn't very easy to follow. Often many characters are introduced without any explanation or understanding of how these characters are important to the story. Matter of fact, many of the characters could have and should have been either expanded upon or written out of the movie. One example of these characters are the children. In the movie one of the characters is pregnant. A family offers to help her with her child while her husband is gone. The child is born. Next thing you know another child is presented without explanation. The first child all of a sudden is no longer living with this family because his mother moved back in with his grandparents. But the movie doesn't tell you this. What happened is that the main family in the story also had a child but failed to mention this. So you are confused when this boy is running around with black hair, then blond, then black, then blond..... it's poor writing. Later on in the movie another child shows up and the movie doesn't explain who the father is, yet all the rest of the characters know who he is without explanation. Also, some of the main characters get married out of the blue without any mention until after the fact. Two characters will meet one day, flirt for a few seconds, then be married without any wedding nor any indication that these two are in love.4. The movie doesn't follow any plot structure that I'm aware of. There is no dramatic climax nor anything building up to one. Like I said before, the movie has no purpose.The only good things I can say about this movie is that it looks great and I really liked the costumes. The setting and photography were excellent. It was just wasted on such a poor script.

Greg Mullins I didn't read the book, though it was one of the Director's favorites from her high school days. Which means her departures weren't ignorant but intentional. Many of the movies in my small library are some of the best of film literature that we have, so there is a great appreciation for it on my part. But I don't think it impossible to make a good movie that differs from the book. Apparently this one, like so many - does.The movie is sumptuous, and beautifully so. It is, as I'm sure others have said, a feast for the eyes. I found it to be most excellent in every way, including both Reese Witherspoon as the lead, and the events coming full circle to a happy ending. If you enjoy the best of Merchant-Ivory, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, or any other well made period piece - I can't imagine you not enjoying this. It is well worth the watching.Since the entire production crew was a gaggle of women (I say that lovingly), there are visible elements of underlying political and social commentary favoring the feminine. Which is simply an observation, diverging from Mira Nair's small denial to the contrary. It was well written, well acted, well shot and well directed. I've enjoyed it immensely, several times, and will several more . . .