The Girl on the Train

Paula Hawkins' bestseller about depressed, daydreaming commuter gets just the right lurid-adaptation treatment.

3099d ago

And yet, despite the aforementioned faults, The Girl on the Train feels destined for a long life on small screens, both television and computer, for many days to come.

3099d ago

Emily Blunt excels as the broken-down heroine of Paula Hawkins' bestseller: a fragmented thriller soap opera of sex, booze, violence, and postfeminist empathy.

3099d ago

The Girl on the Train is a preposterous movie but not an unenjoyable one. If that sounds like faint praise, well, it is and it isn’t. There’s always something to be said for an entertainment that sustains its nuttiness all the way to its twisty finish.

3099d ago

The campy Girl On The Train can’t catch up to Gone Girl.

3099d ago

While Hawkins has rightly shot down glib comparisons between “Gone Girl” and “The Girl On The Train,” they are similar in one crucial way: the stories are ridiculous.

3099d ago

'The Girl on the Train': A feminist take on murder mysteries misses, despite a powerhouse turn by Emily Blunt.

3099d ago

A terrifically broken Emily Blunt stops The Girl On the Train going off the rails.

3099d ago

The oddest exchange has Rachel and Dr. Abdic trading pleasantries about their dialects. It's strange because even with Blunt front and center, the movie itself remains dramatically uninflected.

3099d ago

Tate Taylor's adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ novel is surprisingly earnest.

3099d ago

The film never quite succeeds, simply because the book’s core virtues do not lend themselves to cinema.

3099d ago

The success of a thriller such as “The Girl on the Train” depends entirely on where it takes you, but so dismal and disappointing is this story’s destination that it might as well be called “The Girl on the Train to Bridgeport.”

3099d ago

Everyone from Agatha Christie to Mariska Hargitay has made it clear that these stories need to work both forwards and backwards to hold up to the scrutiny of an attentive audience. The Girl on the Train, though an enjoyable enough ride, goes idle once it slows down long enough for you to take in the full view of things.

3099d ago

It’s a tedious watch, inferior in every way to David Fincher’s slick, grinningly grim Gone Girl. Any chance for lightning striking twice is going, going, gone.

3099d ago

Divorced alcoholic Rachel (Emily Blunt) rides the train to New York every day and develops an unnatural obsession with a married couple in a house she travels past. But, when the wife disappears, she integrates herself into the investigation by posing as the missing woman’s friend.

3099d ago

As for special effects, did you honestly doubt that peeling duct tape and a sheet of printed fabric, if handled with imaginative brio, could be as frightening as any ten-million-dollar monster? O ye of little faith.

3099d ago

Tate Taylor's adaptation of the best-selling Paula Hawkins novel stars Emily Blunt as an alcoholic who becomes obsessed with a local murder case.

3099d ago

The Girl on the Train is more successful as a public service announcement about the dangers of binge drinking than as a gripping, twisty mystery.

3099d ago

Also oddly, the men in the equation are afforded even less characterization, even though they’re the ones who dictate how the women feel about themselves. And so when “The Girl on the Train” finally answers the question of whodunit—reliably, for once—the result is more of a shrug than a shock.

3099d ago

Even viewers who are mildly diverted by the whodunit angle are unlikely to find themselves emotionally engaged in the outcome.

3099d ago

Tate Taylor's The Girl on the Train is a grimly deadpan lecture about messy truths and false perceptions.

3099d ago

A strong lead performance is about all this bungled adaptation of Paula Hawkins’s twisty novel has to offer.

3099d ago