World Trade Center

Newsweek David Ansen

World Trade Center celebrates the ties that bind us, the bonds that keep us going, the goodness that stands as a rebuke to the horror of that day. Perhaps, in the future, the times will call for more challenging, or polemical, or subversive visions. Right now, it feels like the 9/11 movie we need.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

This is a film of terrific selectivity. By focusing on two of the few who did survive the collapse, the film achieves emotional power and an uplifting ending.

Time Richard Schickel

Very simply, World Trade Center is a powerful movie experience, a hymn in plainsong that glorifies that which is best in the American spirit.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Mr. Stone has taken a public tragedy and turned it into something at once genuinely stirring and terribly sad. His film offers both a harrowing return to a singular, disastrous episode in the recent past and a refuge from the ugly, depressing realities of its aftermath.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The strong personalities of Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who play typical supportive wives, keep scenes from sagging.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning in its simplicity and aching details.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

It's as harrowing as moviegoing gets.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

World Trade Center is Stone's most potent motion picture since "Platoon," and may be the most accessible across-the-board since "Wall Street."

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The lack of stellar performances gradually becomes a virtue of the movie as we forget we're watching actors in roles, and Stone builds a documentarylike veracity that gives the saga of the trapped cops and their loved ones a riveting immediacy.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

At its best it shares with Stone's finest work a feeling for the imminence of death and salvation.

The New Yorker David Denby

This square movie, at its best, is very powerful.

Empire Ian Nathan

Even without his box of political tricks, Oliver Stone remains the foremost cinematic shrink for America's distress.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

It may not tell us anything about terror in the new millennium, but the filmmakers' work is solid and affecting. In its own over-emphatic, sometimes clumsy way, it can move an audience to tears, cathartic laughs and cheers.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

One reason World Trade Center is such a good, healing cry is that it absolves us of the discomfort of thinking about everything that has happened since.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A physically impressive, well-acted, sometimes emotionally powerful - and mostly apolitical - re-creation of that awful day that has some conservative pundits praising Stone as some sort of born-again patriot.

Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell

Where "United 93" was lean and merciless and got you thinking hard about how you might conduct yourself in a no-win situation, World Trade Center is reassuring.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Where "United 93" was a superb example of masterful storytelling, World Trade Center is a more conventional rendering.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

A straightforward, earnest, sentimental picture: It's all the things you'd think a Sept. 11 movie directed by Oliver Stone would never be.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

A scrupulous and honorable film. Yet it never comes close to being a revelatory one; it sentimentalizes more than it haunts.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Undeniably affecting, but you leave it wanting more.

Variety Brian Lowry

World Trade Center yields lovely and touching moments but proves a slow-going, arduous movie experience.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

World Trade Center is Stone's rehabilitation. It's not just courage that's honored, it's God's Will. It isn't only men who are saved, it's their families -- and their family values.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Stone has concentrated on one of the catastrophe's stories and has fashioned it well--with almost palpable physical detail, and with performances that never sink to exploitation.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

Without being too glib about it, World Trade Center is a most improbable thing: an upbeat film about September 11, one of the few stories to emerge from that day to come with a happy ending.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Although the conclusion is heavily sentimentalized, Stone finds the common ground Americans can rally around for relief from the devastation: We are, in the final analysis, good people.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Like Stone's "Platoon," World Trade Center has the visceral stuff it takes to appeal to audiences of all political stripes. Unlike "Platoon," however, its sense of craft feels impersonal.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Despite the best efforts of the cast (Cage is especially evocative in a literally confined role), Stone can't disguise the fact that his movie, like his heroes, has come to a kinetic halt, stuck between a narrative rock and an emotional hard place.

Premiere Aaron Hillis

Underscored by the fragility of a plinking piano and well-timed flourishes to uplift, this heroic heartstring-tugger is still frequently and unexpectedly affecting, so much that it's able to hide its true face as a glorified movie-of-the-week.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Stone, the master of the epic conspiracy and the operatic spectacle of diametrically opposed forces at war for men's souls, is so entangled in the trees that he's lost sight of the forest -- who could have imagined?

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Perhaps only a marginally effective movie about 9/11, because, I suspect, there can be no such thing as an effective movie about 9/11 -- at least not right now.

Slate Dana Stevens

When Stone's movie is at its best, it simply ignores the temptation to say everything about 9/11, instead keeping its focus tightly trained on the two domestic dramas at its center.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

A true story of courage and survival, yes. But viewing the destruction of the World Trade Center--in a film called World Trade Center--through this kind of prism represents a distinctly Hollywood brand of tunnel vision.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

The problem is not so much that World Trade Center is an attempt to make a feel-good movie about a ghastly situation, it's that the result feels forced, manufactured and largely -- but not entirely -- unconvincing.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

World Trade Center shows us many things we already know, though with impressive flair, then plunges underground for an unconvincing drama based on a multitude of facts. It's upbeat, all right, but badly off kilter.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

It telegraphs its emotions loud and clear, but somehow they don't reach us.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Stone does everything he can to do justice to the real-life people he's depicting, and yet nothing he does can cover up the film's single but overarching weakness: The personal story he uses to portray the larger event is limited in scope and impact.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

World Trade Center is fatally benign -- an unexceptionable and therefore unexceptional heroic narrative that does little to further the tentative creep of our pop culture toward parsing the significance of that catastrophic day.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

I don't question the legitimacy of celebrating the courage of these individuals and their families, and I can even tolerate the hokey nostalgia for World War II epics. But I'm troubled that the filmmakers have elided so much else of what happened on that day, as if it were some kind of neutral backdrop.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

The politics of Stone's 9/11 movie lean right, if they lean any way at all. Mostly, the film sits up straight and just wants to be loved by all. There are more controversial Hallmark cards.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

Almost unforgivably sentimental.