“The title role in Albert Nobbs goes to Glenn Close, who played it Off Broadway thirty years ago and has striven ever since to bring it to the screen. She co-wrote and co-produced the film, and is seldom out of our sight. But what do we see? Albert is a woman dressed as a man, in the Ireland of the late eighteen-hundreds, yet what Close serves up is neither man nor woman, flesh nor fowl, but a strange hieratic hybrid of no discernible identity.

“She walks as though freshly risen from the dead, patrolling the streets and corridors in a stiffened glide, with those dark, deep-sunk eyes of hers staring hard ahead. Albert is a waiter in an upmarket Dublin hotel, and the uniform adds starch to her otherworldliness: grief-black suit and tie, snowy shirt, and, for outdoors, a rolled umbrella and an ill-fitting bowler hat. What you feel, watching Close, is not that you are watching gender being bent into new, absorbing shapes but that you might as well have stayed home and leafed through a book on Magritte.” — from Anthony Lane‘s 2.6 review in The New Yorker.