The elegant savagery of the author Richard Yates’s dialogue, which reads with a gratifyingly poetic violence, doesn’t sit quite as easily in the mouths of actors. Still the performances are forceful...

In making a better man out of Frank Wheeler, Mendes and Haythe have, unfortunately, thrown out one of the real achievement's of Yates's novel: his ruthless critique of 1950s masculinity.

This is a handsome, intelligent and careful adaptation which may be too bookish... Always fully engrossing, even if it is too coolly detached to ever be involving.

DiCaprio and Winslet have rarely been better.