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100There isn't a bad performance here, but besides Thornton, Luke stands out.
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100The 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.
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90Few films have shown so powerfully the slashing double edge of sports fever.
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88The 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.
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88A smart, sharp, stirring adaptation of the H.G. Bissinger best-seller.
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88One of the best football movies ever, Nights in the end celebrates the game.
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83Thornton, giving a splendid, disciplined performance, seamlessly shapes his coach into a believable man of quality rather than star-size charisma.
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80The 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.
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80Country 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.
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Director Peter Berg, an actor himself, gets quietly excruciated performances from the team members.
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80The movie works because Berg never forgets to keep his heart in the game and not just his head.
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Captures all the action of a tumultuous season while showing the emotional toll on the players.
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75Thornton gets inside the coach's skin. It's a subtle, soulful performance in a movie that otherwise goes for the jugular.
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Rousing, action-packed.
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75Compelling.
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75It also bears something you rarely experience in a football movie. Friday Night Lights has a soul.
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75Berg's picture is certainly an above average effort that provides a solid emotional punch.
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75The film goes for a grainy, fast-cut, documentary look that is both a blessing and a curse.
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70Stands 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.
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70When 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.
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70Real enough around the edges to hold our attention even if it sacrifices accuracy for storytelling ease.
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70Uplifting 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.
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70Friday 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.
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70For 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.
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70Honest because it gets a paradoxical truth: There's more to life than football, even when there isn't.
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Give credit to Berg for keeping Bissinger's all-too-true ending intact. It's a doozy.
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67The 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.
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63It's all amiably hackneyed, but it sucks you in anyway.
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63The 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.
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63In the deck of clichés that is the typical sports movie, it at least does us the courtesy of shuffling the cards a little.
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63It's a passably made, grittily acted slice of life in Texas that veers not an inch from the norm for this sort of picture.
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60The film also benefits from unusually solid writing and a masterfully understated turn by Billy Bob Thornton.
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58Acted 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
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50Too much about the game and not enough about the town, the players and everything else.
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40There's some good acting in this mess.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 44 out of 63
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Mixed: 2 out of 63
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Negative: 17 out of 63
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DanielV10You have to be into sports especially football to really appreciate this work.
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TylerD10
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BrandonL.1