The Glass Castle

1,535 Views Updated: 11 Aug 2017
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Critics Review

The Glass Castle is an intense drama based on Jeannette Walls' best-selling memoir. The film version is directed with off-putting artificiality by Destin Daniel Cretton, who wrote the by-the-numbers script with Andrew Lanham. A young girl comes of age in a dysfunctional family of nonconformist nomads with a mother who's an eccentric artist and an alcoholic father who would stir the children's imagination with hope as a distraction to their poverty.

Stars:	Brie Larson, Naomi Watts, Max Greenfield, Woody Harrelson, Sarah, Snook
Director:	Destin Daniel Cretton
Writer:	Destin Daniel Cretton, Marti, Noxon, Andrew Lanham
Category:	Drama
Release Date:	11-Aug-2017,
Overall Ratings:	3.2 / 5

If you liked reading 'The Glass Castle,' then you must watch the movie. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and starring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts, Max Greenfield, and Woody Harrelson among others, the film explores the complex tale of free spirited parents who wish to teach their children how to take care of themselves.

The plot of the movie seems interesting but will the movie stand true to its plot? Read the reviews to find out!

Rolling Stone

The film keeps selling easy uplift – even in a coda featuring Walls and her real parents – when it most needs to generate raw emotion and blunt truth. Hollywood has a knack for sanitizing books that deserve better. In the case of The Glass Castle, it's a damn shame.

Collider

It’s the kind of story that you can see working much better as a memoir as you sit down and spend time with Jeannette and her family, but the narrative drive of a two-hour film gets stuck in a loop rather than letting you see Jeannette’s childhood and parents through her eyes. There’s a great deal of specificity in Cretton’s adaptation, but it constantly has trouble finding depth.

Vox

The Glass Castle tells the story of a roving, difficult upbringing through parallel timelines. The film seems to want to have it a few different ways, drawing on all of those emotional threads at once, and in the end, they crash into one another in an unwieldy manner. For most of the movie’s runtime, it seems like a story about coming to grips with your complicated feelings about the past, but by the end, some of the complexity seems to have evaporated.

The New York Times

Lacking the book’s episodic sprawl and psychological nuance, their movie clings to its essential tension. The movie bogs down in dialogue-heavy obvious scenes, some of which refer to events in the book that didn’t make it onto the screen. It’s both too tidy and too messy and at the same time neither quite wild nor quite sensible enough.