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80The film is, above all, a moving portrait of hurting souls, brought to life in compelling performances.
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75At the finish, the filmmakers give us at least three different endings, probably because they have no idea what Freedomland is saying, probably because it's not saying much of anything. But a film with this many virtues can't be written off as just another average entry.
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75Strong acting is one of the film's hallmarks. It has been a while since Samuel L. Jackson has given a performance with this much intensity.
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75The film doesn't lose its way emotionally; it's full of great monologues about loss and responsibility.
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Its focus--the children--are not even onscreen very much. But their ghosts are everywhere, and the pain of the film is primal.
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67Moore doesn't just act. She goes on the attack, embracing the kind of lower-rung-of-the-middle-class role that actresses from Jodie Foster to Meryl Streep have long savored. Her performance is an achievement of sorts, yet, like the movie itself, it's also strenuous and joyless.
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67If Freedomland reminds you of Spike Lee's "Clockers," that's not by accident. Like that film, it's adapted by Richard Price from his novel and is set in the neighboring Northern New Jersey communities of Dempsy, predominantly poor and African-American, and the largely white blue-collar suburb of Gannon.
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67Like most Price movies, it's challenging, engaging and free of the usual thriller cliches.
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First-rate actors bail out second-rate directors all the time, and Freedomland serves as the latest example.
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63Moore is as gutsy an actress as there is today, and I'm not sure I've seen a star as dressed down for a psychological unpeeling since Jessica Lange in "Frances," in 1982, or farther back, Olivia de Havilland in 1948's "The Snake Pit." It's strong stuff.
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63Hugely ambitious and driven by Julianne Moore, Samuel L. Jackson and Edie Falco's fine, intense performances, Richard Price's adaptation of his own sprawling novel about a racially charged kidnapping that turns a volatile New Jersey town into a powder keg tries to tell too many stories in too little time.
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63Price has written a screenplay that may be complex and ambitious to a fault.
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60An unexpectedly troubling crime thriller.
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58Unfortunately, the waste of artistic possibilities dwarfs the human wreckage - and the human salvage - in Freedomland.
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50Individual scenes feel authentic, but the story tries to build bridges between loose ends.
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50A slight, not entirely engaging mystery with slight overtones about the dangers of racial profiling that, unlike "Clockers," treats its urban-plight theme as a backdrop, instead of its main subject.
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50Surrounding Council and Moore in this cacophonous, bleak New Jersey are a set of cops, neighbors, and relatives played by actors that the unimaginative Roth yanked directly from various TV gritty crime shows; it's like he thought HBO was his personal casting agent.
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50Freedomland, overall, could have been so much better. But Moore, even in a performance as patchy as this one, is something to watch. She's an echo of the movie that might have been.
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50Despite a few raw moments, pic feels like a Lifetime movie with a marquee cast.
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50This would have made a fascinating film if Freedomland were one movie. Instead, it turns into several movies, none fully realized. What could have been an unusually smart police procedural becomes a sprawling, overwrought melodrama that itself morphs into a sort of spiritual romance.
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50Only Edie Falco, appearing as a bereft mother leading a citizen's group that searches for missing children, suggests the great film that Freedomland might have been.
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40What, a white woman can’t take an innocent drive through the ghetto without arousing suspicion? What’s this world coming to?
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40A prime example of what works in a book not working in a film.
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40The problem lies not in the plotting alone. Roth's direction does nothing to bring clarity to the story and its characters, and his blocking of the film's action scenes is downright muddled and vague.
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40Ordinarily it's kind of hard to screw up a Richard Price story, but the writer is his own worst enemy here, with a screenplay so filled with bromides and object lessons from God, you can't tell what he's trying to say.
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40Anyone who has seen the trailers for Freedomland, which don't exactly skimp on maternal angst, already knows this is going to be a sad-mommy story. What we don't know is that it may be a bad-mommy story as well.
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38This tale of a white mother's kid gone missing in a black New Jersey neighborhood - and the tensions and news media attention that ensue - is pretty much pure jive.
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38Steer clear of Freedomland, the movie. Your time would be better spent reading Richard Price's much more compelling 1998 novel.
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38An overblown urban crime drama that should be a lot better than it is.
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25Roth takes three powerhouse actors -- Julianne Moore as the mother, Samuel L. Jackson as the cop who interrogates her and Edie Falco as another woman who lost her son -- and reduces their talents to rubble and their characters to screeching cliches.
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25With Roth at the helm of a script attributed to Price, there is minimal suspense, audience involvement or coherent social commentary.
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25Freedomland is the worst kind of bad movie: one that thinks it's important.
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20Freedomland manages a seemingly impossible feat: It's both turgid AND overwrought, eliciting the shriek that fades into a yawn without anyone ever noticing. It's a wholly dreary piece of work.
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10An early candidate for worst film of the year is Freedomland, an inept, lethally dull drama.
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10The production can best be described by several f-words. It is frenetic, frazzled and febrile. It is also feeble -- almost touchingly so, if you think of what bottomless insecurity must have prompted so much bombast.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 13 out of 22
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Mixed: 1 out of 22
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Negative: 8 out of 22
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AlanNutter8
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AdamG1
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MichaelL.9