Good Night, and Good Luck

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Vividly re- creates TV news icon Edward R. Murrow's historic face-off with Sen. Joseph McCarthy in devastatingly low-key detail -- is the right movie at the right time.

Newsweek David Ansen

It's a passionate, serious, impeccably crafted movie tackling a subject Clooney cares about deeply: the duty of journalism to speak truth to power. It also happens to be the most compelling American movie of the year so far.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

The biggest little movie of the year - and one of the best ever about the news media.

USA Today Mike Clark

The only things missing from making this showdown worthy of a Western is Murrow's sheriff's badge, a dusty street and maybe a spittoon for McCarthy's infamous invectives.

Dallas Observer Jean Oppenheimer

A riveting movie that's as entertaining as it is socially and politically important.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

You go to Good Night, and Good Luck expecting inspiration, and you get it. It's also unexpectedly subtle, tense, and challenging, complex both in its take on its subject and in its craftsmanship. So the movie brings you to your feet - and, at times, to tears.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The other key character is McCarthy himself, and Clooney uses a masterstroke: He employs actual news footage of McCarthy, who therefore plays himself.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

It'll preach mainly to the choir - lazy thinkers won't attend, despite George Clooney's attachment as director and actor - but maybe it'll wake a few sleepers.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

A paragon of subtlety. Yet this message is exactly what we carry out of the theater, and it lingers on with a powerful resonance.

The New Yorker David Denby

This is an elegant and stirring entertainment about the hard-drinking, hard-smoking reporters of "See It Now," the show that Murrow and the producer Fred Friendly put together every week.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

He [Clooney] has found a cogent subject, an urgent set of ideas and a formally inventive, absolutely convincing way to make them live on screen.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Couldn't be more unlikely, more unfashionable -- or more compelling.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Langella is terrific in a small but critical role as CBS president William Paley, although the one essential problem with the film is that it never clearly delineates the jobs fulfilled by the cluster of other newsroom employees that are always huddled about.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

David Strathairn, playing Murrow, follows his writers' lead beautifully, delivering a performance that's all understatement on the surface and searing fire underneath.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

In ninety-three tight, terrifically exciting minutes, Clooney makes integrity look mighty sexy.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Urgent and stunning movie.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Like other actors who successfully create a cinematic doppelganger of a real person, Strathairn gets under the character's skin.

TV Guide Ken Fox

That the film should have the look and feel of a classic teleplay by, say, Rod Serling, is probably no accident -- the style is one more reminder of just how regrettably short of Murrow's vision we've fallen.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

A puzzle: a hermetically sealed period piece so intensely relevant to our current state of affairs that it takes your breath away.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

An unusual and absorbing, if somewhat preachy film.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

A solid achievement, but those in the press who have been trumpeting its greatness may be going in for a bit of self-congratulation. The movie plays very well to the choir.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Good Night, and Good Luck has a small-scale time-capsule fascination, yet its hermeticism is really a form of moral caution -- a way of keeping the issues neat, the liberal idealism untainted.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Good Night, and Good Luck's primary handicap is history itself -- the toe-to-toe televised dialogue between McCarthy and Murrow was, however arguably vital to the Wisconsin senator's eventual retreat, brief and less than epochal. Even so, the wonderfully mustered context wins out.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Many movies these days are too long; this one, at 90 minutes, feels too short. That's because its purpose is so sharply defined: a tight close-up, in black and white, of a single, seminal moment -- a black and white moment -- in American history, and American journalism.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

It doesn't sacrifice craftsmanship and elegance at the altar of its strong convictions.

Variety Todd McCarthy

A vital chapter of mid-century history is brought to life concisely, with intimacy and matter-of-fact artistry.

Slate David Edelstein

A passionate and rousing piece of filmmaking--a civics lesson with the punch of a good melodrama.

Empire Simon Crook

Provocative, principled and richly detailed, this is compelling stuff. Emotionally it’s a little dry, but as brain-food, it’s absolutely invigorating.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

Good Night, and Good Luck may be simplified history, but it's almost consistently well-crafted.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

An entertaining slice of American political and cultural history.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

The result, then, is good, not great. But it is hard to come by good films about media and politics, and why the intersection thereof matters so much in a democracy.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

None-too-subtly implies Murrow could easily be talking about the present day.

The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

Moviegoers who know their American political history will respond to the film's immediacy and forgive the film's tight focus and narrow view. Anyone hoping for an entertaining drama about newsmen and politics along the lines of "All the President's Men" will be disappointed.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Where "Quiz Show" elevated its story to the level of Shakespearean tragedy, Clooney's film is too lightweight to reach such tragic heights. In part, it's too short--at 90 minutes, including musical interludes and lengthy monologues taken whole-cloth from the historical record, Good Night breezes by effortlessly when it really needs time and space to build up to appropriately epic dimensions.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Though I'm not fully convinced that cool and jazzy is the way to go with one of the great civil-rights battles of 20th-century America, George Clooney's elegantly muted take on Edward R. Murrow's fight with Joe McCarthy offers many riches, notably a wicked character study of Murrow and a sexy homage to the pleasures of teamwork when the team is a bunch of smart-ass liberal reporters making common cause against a wannabe dictator.

New York Magazine Ken Tucker

Clooney may be a specialist in embattled camaraderie--he helped revive "Ocean's Eleven," after all--but as in that caper remake, there's no depth to these characterizations, and Downey and Clarkson are squandered in a goes-nowhere subplot about their secret marriage.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The film adopts, somewhat insidiously, the myth that life was simpler back in 1953 and '54, and it offers Murrow as a lesson for today.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The film, therefore, is like a child's view of these events, untroubled by complexity, hungry for myth and simplicity.

Time Richard Schickel

There is more to the intertwined stories of Murrow and McCarthy than this simpleminded, rhetorically driven movie begins to encompass.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Yet the McCarthy/Murrow conflict in the picture is not pressing enough--these days, anyway--to justify the considerable skill expended on it.

Film Threat Phil Hall

Clooney has littered his film with such a high quantity of mistakes that it is hard to know where exactly to begin finding fault.