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Christianity Today Movies is the only religious press site to publish a review since the film's opening. Camerin Cortney calls it "a moving work of art" and says "no one can argue that the acting in the film is anything but superb." She concludes that the film is "a lavishly spun tale of friendship and rivalry, hope and despair, choice and duty, love and lust, traditional custom and forbidden emotion."

Most mainstream film critics are unhappy with it, saying the makeup doesn't disguise the missteps.

(Plugged In) says, "Memoirs offers little explicit commentary on how men treat these alluring women. But I believe it does illustrate how deeply demeaning the objectification of the geisha ultimately is. … Whatever beauty the geisha culture may appear to have on the surface, the reality for these women is an ugly one. Perhaps that's why this story left me feeling so cold in the end."

Christian Hamaker (Crosswalk) says the film "is lovely to look at, with its natural scenery matched only by the beauty of its three lead actresses (none of whom are Japanese). But the film suffers from problematic pacing. It bogs down early and feels inert during much of the first hour. When things start to heat up, they go too far, too fast, propelled by a combination of sex, lies and jealousy not overly different from any number of other films that mix romance and professional politics."

Kenneth R. Morefield (Christian Spotlight) acknowledges that this is "a lushly shot, skillfully acted, and competently directed film." But he concludes, "For all the film's insistence that geisha are not courtesans nor prostitutes, for all the underlining that Sayuri's prayers and choices are the product of the absence of choice, the film ultimately celebrates the institution of geishahood for providing an escape from poverty and never seriously gives much thought to the price that it extracts. When Sayuri's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder, we are invited to linger over her triumph in extracting the highest price in history while the cost of the earnings is only hinted at as she lies down to a discreet fadeout."

Darrel Manson (Hollywood Jesus) says, "Leaving the theater after seeing Memoirs of a Geisha, I wasn't quite sure what it was that left me unsatisfied. To be sure, it is a visual pleasure of the highest order. Director Rob Marshall and cinematographer Dion Beebe made almost every frame a work of art. Add to this a wonderful John Williams score incorporating both Western and Eastern music and including gifted musicians Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. On the aesthetic level, this is a film that may be without peer this year. … But in the end, I was disappointed, I think, because the film never picked which themes it wanted to focus on. Instead it gave us bits and pieces of many themes, but not enough to fill out any of them."

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