Nicholas Hoult is legendary Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien in this biopic exploring his formative years.
As a young student, Tolkien finds love, friendship and artistic inspiration among a group of fellow outcasts. Their bond soon strengthens as he goes through a tumultuous courtship with Edith Bratt and the outbreak of World War I - experiences that later inspire his classic Middle-Earth novels.
Films about writers are usually either (a) boring or (b) bollocks. So it’s no surprise Tolkien’s family have rejected Dome Karukoski’s busy biopic, which follows the Lord of the Rings scribe from his wretched childhood right up to the writing of The Hobbit.
Full reviewThe film - stately, well-acted, and ultimately insubstantial - dilutes its considerable charms with hoary literary biopic conventions, and then risks strangling them entirely with its reductively literal takes on the vagaries of artistic inspiration.
Full reviewDirector Dome Karukoski peppers the film with cutaways to imaginary CGI battles and mythological beasties, but none is a fraction as thrilling as the opening moments of Peter Jackson's 'The Fellowship of the Ring'.
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[The movie] teems with many on-the-nose moments. And it does so while hewing so strongly to the Distinguished British Biopic ethos... that it teeters on the edge of genuine obnoxiousness.
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But that imagination is what is most conspicuously lacking in "Tolkien," which too often falls back into a pose of intellectual and aesthetic timidity.
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Handsomely made in the customarily fastidious style of most period biographical dramas, Tolkien is strongly served by Hoult...
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Karukoski's entertaining film boasts flair and narrative ambition, but ultimately fails to completely break free of its traditional biopic frame.
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