Stephanie Zacharek, now writing for Movieline, loves Neil Jordan’s Ondine:
Long before “glamour” was a word applied all too casually to movie stars and red-carpet gowns, it was a term used to denote an enchantment or spell, a cobwebby thing that could either lull a human being into a woozy dream state or suddenly make him feel fully and bracingly alive. Neil Jordan’s modern-day Irish fairy tale Ondine works that kind of glamour, at first offering us the illusion of pure, stolid ordinariness — to the point of being, quite literally, gray — only to shift, before our eyes, into something darkly glittering and spectacular. The magic of Ondine is all beneath the surface, a shimmery school of fish that you can never be fully sure you glimpsed, but whose existence you don’t for an instant doubt. Maybe all you see is a silvery flash, but that’s enough.
And kind words for the film’s star, Colin Farrell:
As Syracuse, Farrell carries so much sadsack sorrow in his eyes that you fear nothing will ever go right for him. He’s scruffy, cautious, unwilling to accept the possibility of happiness: Next to the evanescent Ondine, he’s a rough-skinned, land-bound lion. But once he gets the gist of Ondine’s song — once he falls hard under her spell — he becomes a shimmery creature too, albeit one with a five-o’clock shadow.
More Ondine:
NY Times’ Terrence Rafferty talks to Neil Jordan.
Indiewire’s Peter Knegt runs down the early critical reaction