Friday Night Lights

Chicago Tribune Allison Benedikt

There isn't a bad performance here, but besides Thornton, Luke stands out.

Empire Ian Nathan

The best sports movie for years, as it's not about sport at all. Forget fears of jingoistic grandstanding, this is an un-American all-American tale that deserves attention.

Newsweek David Ansen

Few films have shown so powerfully the slashing double edge of sports fever.

USA Today Mike Clark

One of the best football movies ever, Nights in the end celebrates the game.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The movie demonstrates the power of sports to involve us; we don't live in Odessa and are watching a game played 16 years ago, and we get all wound up.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A smart, sharp, stirring adaptation of the H.G. Bissinger best-seller.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Thornton, giving a splendid, disciplined performance, seamlessly shapes his coach into a believable man of quality rather than star-size charisma.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

The movie works because Berg never forgets to keep his heart in the game and not just his head.

LA Weekly Ron Stringer

Country singer and sometime actor Tim McGraw excels as the bitter, besotted ex-Panther who can't cut his kid enough slack to follow his own game plan.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

The film lets you get caught up in the excitement of this religion and the addictive nature of those stadium lights. Berg and cinematographer Tobias Schliessler get up close to the action, catching the hits and miscues in all their violent urgency.

Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

Captures all the action of a tumultuous season while showing the emotional toll on the players.

Village Voice Benjamin Strong

Director Peter Berg, an actor himself, gets quietly excruciated performances from the team members.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Compelling.

Boston Globe Staff (Not credited)

It also bears something you rarely experience in a football movie. Friday Night Lights has a soul.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Berg's picture is certainly an above average effort that provides a solid emotional punch.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Thornton gets inside the coach's skin. It's a subtle, soulful performance in a movie that otherwise goes for the jugular.

New York Daily News Robert Dominguez

Rousing, action-packed.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The film goes for a grainy, fast-cut, documentary look that is both a blessing and a curse.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

For all its energy, fine performances and dramatic confrontations, Friday Night Lights substitutes intensity for insight, dodging the book's harsher findings like a dazzling broken-field runner.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Friday Night Lights is the "Black Hawk Down" of high school football movies. As exclusively as Ridley Scott's picture was about combat, this film concerns football and nothing but.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

When Friday Night Lights gets to the big games, the time it's spent creates an atmosphere thick with tension, one akin to the real-world experience of watching a favorite team play for its life.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Uplifting and troubling, partly because it is more honest than most sports movies about the high cost and short life span of high school football glory.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

Honest because it gets a paradoxical truth: There's more to life than football, even when there isn't.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Real enough around the edges to hold our attention even if it sacrifices accuracy for storytelling ease.

TV Guide Angel Cohn

Stands out by virtue of its impressive visual style and the filmmakers' decision not to massage the facts into cliched conflicts with neat, feel-good resolutions that produce the proper sense of uplift.

Washington Post Sean Daly

Give credit to Berg for keeping Bissinger's all-too-true ending intact. It's a doozy.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

The game footage is as engrossing as the real thing, although it comes at the expense of diminished attention to the teen players and their emotional problems.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

The last half hour devoted to the Big Game, staged by a crew from NFL films, is genuinely rousing and inspiring. That's where Friday Night Lights finally shines.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It's all amiably hackneyed, but it sucks you in anyway.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

It's a passably made, grittily acted slice of life in Texas that veers not an inch from the norm for this sort of picture.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

In the deck of clichés that is the typical sports movie, it at least does us the courtesy of shuffling the cards a little.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

The film also benefits from unusually solid writing and a masterfully understated turn by Billy Bob Thornton.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Acted with earnest commitment and scored and edited with jazzy, laconic grace, "Lights" tells us absolutely nothing we haven't heard before -- and often -- in sports films

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Too much about the game and not enough about the town, the players and everything else.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

There's some good acting in this mess.