Movie Review: Russell Crowe Confronts Life’s Nasty Weather in ‘Noah’

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By A.O. Scott

Russell Crowe in "Noah," directed by Darren Aronofsky.

HOLLYWOOD---“Noah” is occasionally clumsy, ridiculous and unconvincing, but it is almost never dull, and very little of it has the careful, by-the-numbers quality that characterizes big-studio action-fantasy entertainment. Through five features, from “Pi” to “Black Swan,” Mr. Aronofsky has refined his taste for extremity and his mastery of a queasy, feverish camera style. He specializes in intimate portraits of people whose sense of reality is coming undone, and Noah, played with rabid gloominess by Russell Crowe, is no exception. He tries not only to explore what the story of the flood might mean in the present age of environmental anxiety and apocalyptic religion, but also, more radically, to imagine what it might have felt like to live in a newly created, already-ruined world, and to scan the skies for clues about what its creator might be thinking. [link]