38
Metascore
6 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 50The Hollywood ReporterBoyd van HoeijThe Hollywood ReporterBoyd van HoeijThere’s certainly an overall sense of a formerly rich family’s fortunes dwindling, both economically and emotionally, but the three sections don’t add up to something more than the sum of their parts.
- 50The PlaylistJessica KiangThe PlaylistJessica KiangIf ‘Dying’‘s main issue was a surfeit of ideas, ’Sound’ feels like it suffers from a paucity.
- 40The GuardianPaul MacInnesThe GuardianPaul MacInnesSo bogged down by form, Franco fails to get his head up enough to think about content.
- 40The TelegraphRobbie CollinThe TelegraphRobbie CollinFaulkner’s book, an oblique and complex tale of the American South’s festering decline, hasn’t so much been reworked for cinema as simply dumped on the screen in handfuls, and the result is a swirling mess.
- 40VarietyAndrew BarkerVarietyAndrew BarkerThe Sound and the Fury is certainly a folly, failing to capture the weird, entrancing, often maddening ambiance of the great writer’s elliptical masterpiece, and its surfeit of half-baked film-student flourishes and needless cameos occasionally give it an amateur-hour feel.
- 30We Got This CoveredMatt HoffmanWe Got This CoveredMatt HoffmanOne can say that Faulkner is unfilmable, but any work will be unfilmable when it is being adapted by a talentless director. In this case, the fault of the film’s issues stem completely from Franco and not at all with the difficulty in Faulkner’s writing. Hopefully, after two failed outings, the actor will learn to leave Faulkner’s masterful work alone. Although knowing him, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him try his hand at adapting one of the author’s works again.