Hearts in Atlantis

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Inspiring without sinking into sentimentality or cliche, Hearts of Atlantis is intelligent, heartfelt and genuine, a rare story of childhood for adults.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Rarely does a movie make you feel so warm and so uneasy at the same time.

New Times (L.A.) Robert Wilonsky

As stirring as it is slight, as effective as it is familiar.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Assisted by a well-crafted script by the veteran William Goldman and a masterful performance by Anthony Hopkins, Hicks has turned two King short stories into a somber meditation on the dreams and frustrations of childhood and the ways the adult world makes its darker qualities known.

Washington Post Rita Kempley

Yes, it's corny and reemerging cynics need not apply. But it is blissfully heartwarming.

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

Where other King stories and hundreds of other movies simplistically exploit the archetype, this tale intricately relates the actions of its young evildoer to the more abstract forces bearing down on the adults.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

The heartfelt use of extrasensory events as metaphors for a child's grasp of adult mysteries has a poetry to it, and the unblinking sympathy for kids struggling with evil and with the strange frequencies of prepubescent passion can, if your defenses are down, lay you out.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

A powerful and surehandedly crafted depth charge of a movie.

USA Today Mike Clark

Don't underestimate the appeal of a heart-tugger that's this well mounted.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Sometimes thrilling, sometimes suffocatingly tasteful adaptation of Stephen King's 1999 novel.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Hicks doesn't always keep the story clear and compelling, but Hopkins is in top form.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Too poky and contrived to be a good movie, but its lushly serene atmospherics, given current events, make it a pure slice of sentimental comfort food.

Portland Oregonian Barry Johnson

The mix of psychic thriller and childhood memory movies is smooth, maybe too smooth. Neither becomes truly gripping, despite fine acting by Hopkins, Yelchin and Boorem.

Philadelphia Inquirer Desmond Ryan

A film with many redeeming qualities. Its heart is certainly in the right place, but its head makes some misjudgments.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

The resulting film directed by Scott Hicks is afflicted by terminal nostalgic drift. You come out of the theater with nothing more specific than half-pleasant memories of baseball gloves, Ferris wheels and vintage automobiles. I've had naps that were more exciting.

Variety Todd McCarthy

The few who saw the embalmed adaptation of "Snow Falling on Cedars" will recognize the same stifling approach brought to this more accessible material by director Scott Hicks.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

What's missing, really, is a point. Like "Snow Falling on Cedars," Hicks composes every shot in Hearts in Atlantis as if it were his last.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Unabashedly sentimental, it's meant to touch our hearts in profound and important ways, but misses the mark by drawing too deeply from a pool of schmaltz.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

What a shame, though, that the movie isn't a livelier business.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Hicks smothers the story in portentous images and the obligatory memory-inducing soundtrack. The effect is like peering at a photo through layers of shellac: evocative but remote.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Is it possible to have too much Anthony Hopkins? Believe it or not, the answer is yes. Hopkins' quiet power and perfectly formed vowels overwhelm the rickety, falsely sentimental Hearts in Atlantis.

Newsweek David Ansen

Slightly soggy.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A fussy piece of schmaltz that makes you long for "Stand By Me," a vastly superior coming-of-age tale from King's pen.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The kids provide all the vitality, but even they've been muffled by the director.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The movie is pleasant enough, in its studied way, and Mr. Hopkins does as well as anyone could in the role of a wise man with vaguely supernatural powers. Still, it's awfully amorphous and pokey.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

I had looked forward to seeing King's low men and their hideous yellow coats and monstrous high-finned automobiles, but what we've got here is less King than Goldman, and less fun to boot.

LA Weekly Manohla Dargis

For all the highfalutin dialogue and mysterioso goings-on, the only true mystery Hicks and Goldman conjure up is whether the mellifluously voiced outsider is dangling his new friend a little too closely on his knee.

Film Threat Kevin Park

The reason I hate this movie so much (besides the fact that it sucked) is that there was so much behind it and it still was a bland.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

It's not hell, but limbo, junior high-school style.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Mush, delivered with a trembling, quasi-biblical solemnity, is what emanates from Anthony Hopkins most of the time in Hearts in Atlantis, a nostalgic fiasco so shameless it makes movies like "Simon Birch" and "Frequency" seem as austere as the work of Robert Bresson.