The film stars Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, Dominic West, and Guy Pearce.

[4] In 1929, in New York City, Maxwell Perkins is a successful editor at Scribner's and discoverer of great authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Genius seeks to honor worthy subjects, yet never gets close enough to the titular quality to make watching worth the effort".

"[12] Among the American reviews, meanwhile, Variety opined, "Though Michael Grandage's dull, dun-colored Genius makes every effort to credit the editor's role in shaping the century's great novels, it's nobody's idea of interesting to watch someone wield his red pencil over the pile of pages that would become Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, even if the editor in question is the great Maxwell Perkins.

"[13] The Hollywood Reporter was similarly unimpressed, writing, "The insurmountable problem, however, is that the story engages only late in the game, once Tom has betrayed his father figure by revising his previous acknowledgment of the role Max played in molding his genius.

Set mainly in a picturesquely brown and smoky Manhattan in the 1930s, it gives the buddy-movie treatment to that wild-man novelist Thomas Wolfe and his buttoned-up red-penciler Maxwell Perkins.

"[15] Rolling Stone had the same impression, writing, "You know the drill: Strong source material, in the form of A. Scott Berg's National Book Award-winning biography on Perkins, a top-notch screenwriter (John Logan) and a to-die-for A-list cast.