Metacritic reviews

For those who are open to its challenges, it is a meditation on time, loss, and connection, and almost a century later, those themes are just as vital as they were when Eliot wrote them.

Four Quartets is a special experience.

Unabashedly theatrical in presentation but broken up with interludes of nature, this Four Quartets is a multi-course feast of concentrated flavors: mesmerizing language, masterly invocation, and the kind of poetic imagery that in the hands of a great actor feels like a direct line from Eliot’s pen to our mind’s landscape.

Both Fiennes siblings are smart to never get in the way of Eliot’s words. By simply putting them in front of us and adding some air underneath, the film becomes a piece all its own, made for now.

Fiennes, in his beautifully grave way, slows the poem down for us, speaking the words with rapt deliberation, so that we live in their moment.

Fiennes brings the fire, yet the air around him remains unmoved, even by his embers.