From Hell reviewed: “The Hughes brothers’ portrait of Jack the Ripper and Victorian England misses the intricate

and disturbing nature of the graphic novel on which their film is based.”

The movie is big on fire-red skies and black clouds, wet cobblestones, flickering gaslight, and cloaked figures moving through the fog. In

other words, it revels in exactly the sort of horror-movie clichés that held no interest for Allan Moore or Eddie Campbell. “From Hell”

evokes nothing so much as a pair of small boys given the budget to make their own version of the Hammer horror movies they’ve gorged

on. Which would be fine if the result weren’t such a brain-dead version of a dark and complex work. — Charles Taylor in Salon

On the other hand, Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times, says that “…the Hughes Brothers’ thriller

about the trail of terror left by

Jack the Ripper is one of the most

breathtaking leaps of directing skills in years… (T)he

directors, the twins Allen and Albert

Hughes, find (many ways) to complement, and then top,

the apocalyptic narrative weaving that

Mr. Moore is best at.

…Like Mr. Moore, the Hughes Brothers are interested in large-scale

paranoid fantasies, though they work closer to the real world. Although a

period film set in late-Victorian London might initially seem outside their

purview, what else is the Jack the Ripper tale but a tableau of urban

violence, filled with characters who don’t know where to turn? The tale is

the European antecedent of the Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society and

Dead Presidents.”