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Riveting.
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100Uproarious, moving and thrilling.
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88Not just a great sports movie, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 captures a pivotal moment in recent history.
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75The film isn't much as cinema, but it doesn't really matter. The final half-hour, in particular, generates the sort of suspense you rarely get in a sports documentary.
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75The larger point Harvard Beats Yale makes, perhaps, is about the inevitability of loss. Many of these men, now in their early 60s, look terrific. Others, let us say, do not. Either way, all of them look very different from the helmeted young athletes of 40 years ago. A sense of mortality shadows the documentary. On or off the gridiron, time is the only opponent who always wins. Even at Harvard, even at Yale.
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50Nor does the movie try to use the game to make some larger point. Here's one: Even at its best and luckiest hour, Harvard can aspire only to equal Yale.
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60Rafferty keeps the structure so blandly standard, the title is nearly the most intriguing element of the whole film.
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78Even if you're familiar with the details of the game, Rafferty's suspenseful editing draws you to the edge of your seat and beyond, back into 1968 itself.
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100This may or may not be the greatest instance of college football ever played, but "Brian's Song," J"erry Maguire," and "The Longest Yard" notwithstanding, Rafferty's no-frills annotated replay is the best football movie I've ever seen: A particular day in history becomes a moment out of time.
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90Filmmaker Kevin Rafferty makes the case for remembrance and for the art of the story in his preposterously entertaining documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, preposterous at least for those of us who routinely shun that pagan sacrament.
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90How many thrillers could put the outcome in the title and still provide as many white-knuckle moments as Harvard Beats Yale 29-29?
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80A ripping good yarn, like a Fitzgerald short story rewritten by John Updike, with an uproarious, impossible Hollywood ending.
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80Both an irresistible human story and as fine a documentary on football as "Hoop Dreams" was on basketball.
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67Much like the recent "remember when" documentary "Man On Wire," Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 builds strong momentum in its home stretch, and sends the audience out on a high.
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83The aura of shock-and-awe surrounding this game is laid on a bit thick, and sometimes you feel like you're just watching an ESPN special. Still, it's fun. The interviewees include Harvard's stone-cold-serious Tommy Lee Jones and Brian Dowling, Yale's wonder-boy quarterback who became the model for B.D. in classmate Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury."
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75An engaging chronicle not only of a memorable game but also of an era that seems at once more innocent and combustible than our own.
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70The 37 Yale and Harvard players Rafferty interviews are such a rich and articulate cast of characters that the season leading up to the game and the game itself become an epic story.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 2
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Mixed: 0 out of 2
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Negative: 0 out of 2
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John10
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EdwardK9