- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100Rush ranks among the best movies about auto racing ever made, featuring two great performances from the leads, who capture not only the physical look of the racing legends they’re playing, but the vastly different character traits that made their rivalry, well, made for the movies.
-
100The movie's finest performance is Daniel Bruhl's unapologetic bluntness as Lauda, and his subtle conveyance of jealousy the driver — whose resemblance to a rat is often noted — must have felt about Hunt's popularity and handsomeness.
-
100Brilliantly captures the exhilaration that comes from facing death head-on. It's also an ode to joyous rivalry.
-
100Not just one of the great racing movies of all time, but a virtuoso feat of filmmaking in its own right, elevated by two of the year’s most compelling performances.
-
100Utterly gripping. Aided by two punchy lead turns, an Oscar-worthy script and stunning in-car footage, Howard’s race film delivers top-gear drama. A piston- and heart-pumping triumph.
-
90Howard, whose first job as a director was the 1977 Roger Corman-produced “Grand Theft Auto,” has captured what is surely the greatest racing footage ever shot.
-
90It's both a perceptive dual character study and, that rarity of rarities, a large-scale action movie for grown-ups, one worth leaving the house for.
-
88Rush, which marks a return to form (and more so) for Howard after plodding through adultery buddy movie comedies (The Dilemma) and Dan Brown sequeldom (Angels & Demons), is almost primal.
-
88In a way, Howard has made a philosophical drama about the way men move through the world. It’s just a really, really fast drama.
-
88A fine and fun film tribute to the milieu, the men, women and machines in a sport that was never deadlier or more glamorous than its Disco Decade incarnation.
-
88It's Morgan's core script, full of humor, heartache and verbal fireworks, that lifts Rush above the "Fast & Furious" herd.
-
86Rush is one of those rare sports movies that’s compelling as both a drama and a spectacle.
-
Sep 20, 201385A swift-moving, character-rich biopic whose kinetic Grand Prix sequences are constantly being overshadowed by genuinely riveting scenes of ... people talking.
-
83Rush is a pretty thrilling piece of pop entertainment. It's excitingly assembled and moves like a bullet, highly engaging and nerve-wracking when it needs to be and light on its feet elsewhere.
-
80Still, it is a writer's privilege to trim and tailor at will, and everybody loves a duel. It would take the dullest of curmudgeons not to enjoy the surge of this saga, accurate or not, and the excesses of what already feels like a distant age. [30 Sept. 2013, p.84]
-
80Rush is just that -- a rush, and a film that is sure to get audiences' engines going.
-
80This is tremendously exciting cinema – shot by the boundary-pushing Anthony Dod Mantle – as well as old-school escapist drama with ample eye candy for viewers of all persuasions.
-
80Rush satisfies our lust for both grand character combat and deadly gearhead spectacle.
-
80Mr. Howard doesn’t just want you to crawl inside a Formula One racecar, he also wants you to crawl inside its driver’s head.
-
80Rush is fast, slippery, stormy and dangerous.
-
80What Rush has to offer is a great human drama, two dangerously talented men pushing each other to risky victory and a superb script, delivered with some mastery by Hemsworth and Brühl.
-
Sep 4, 201380It rarely deviates from formula, but Rush wins big, delivering the most exciting F1 footage created for film. Like Hunt, it is sexy, funny, full of thrills. Like Lauda, it is intelligent, a bit blunt, but ultimately touching.
-
80Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bruhl excel as, respectively, British wild man and hedonist James Hunt and Austrian by-the-books tactician Niki Lauda.
-
80Rush has sex, glamour, a fair degree of wit and a breathless, pedal-to-the-metal spirit. But its greatest achievement may be to underline that there are real men, all vulnerable flesh and blood, inside those infernal machines.
-
75Rush, though it will win no trophies, is fine filmmaking, a smart, visually engorged, frequently thrilling tale of boyish competition — inspired by a true story. At heart it’s “Amadeus” on wheels, only this time Salieri is the Austrian.
-
75The result is a solid film, but one that remains more interesting than intense.
-
75Howard directs Rush with speed and jangly, jarring verve, bringing the races themselves to white-knuckled life and allowing the men’s stories to play out with only slightly predictable reversals, upsets and, inevitably, those hard lessons learned.
-
75Howard directs Rush with speed and jangly, jarring verve, bringing the races themselves to white-knuckled life and allowing the men’s stories to play out with only slightly predictable reversals, upsets and, inevitably, those hard lessons learned.
-
75The ego trips and sexuality and driving are all filmed with equal intensity, to the point where the emotions and flesh and crunched metal seem to blend together. The movie's only major problem is that the tension sometimes overwhelms.
-
75Formula One fans who remember 1976 will no doubt delight in the film but, for those who (like me) were more interested in other things during the year of America's bicentennial, it's not only a good lesson in sports history but an entertaining two hours to spend in a theater.
-
75Rush is the kind of Hollywood studio production that has sadly become all too rare — a smart, exciting, R-rated entertainment for grown-ups that quickens your pulse and puts on a great show without ever insulting your intelligence.
-
75Rush hits a few potholes, but in the end it reveals the psyches of two men who only feel alive when they're cheating death.
-
70Though one enjoys and appreciates Rush for what it is, it does not thrill the blood the way we have the right to expect a film like this to do.
-
70Howard and Morgan make the journey intense enough to keep audiences guessing up to the finish line.
-
67Rush, a film about two real-life titans of Formula One racing in the Seventies, splits its narrative between these oil-and-water personalities, which feels about right: It's only half of a good movie.
-
67Rush isn’t bad, exactly, but it’s like a standard-issue male action programmer that somehow crept in from an earlier era.
-
67Rush, in other words, is a foursquare sportsmanship movie, offering little in the way of surprises but plenty of earnest, satisfying thrills.
-
Sep 27, 201363The problem with car-racing movies, though, is that they are car-racing movies. Has any director found a way to spare audiences the eventual tedium of watching automobiles go around and around a track and instead capture the thrill of the sport?
-
63It's big, brash and dramatically it goes in circles. The first two may be enough for most people, especially if they're into Formula One racing, to overlook the third.
-
60Howard, whose previous tales of men in professional peril include the topnotch “Apollo 13” as well as “Backdraft” and “Cinderella Man,” works with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to create a style in the racing scenes that makes the most of every angle. By the time the final lap of Rush starts, we’re up for the ride.
-
50I might have tolerated the film much more with the sound off. With the volume on, this movie feels like a mucho-macho Saturday morning cartoon—specifically Bugs Bunny toying with his eternal pursuer, Elmer Fudd.
-
50For all its immersion in the roar, grease and danger of Formula One, the fact-based Rush — about the sport's great rivalry of the 1970s — is also more predictable than a pit stop, something well-suited to Mr. Howard. He's made perfectly palatable pictures, but never a truly great one, partly because he has such a weakness for the commercial and a consequent gift for the obvious.
-
40The movie leans on symbolic imagery that’s alternately tired and ridiculous: Hunt’s impatiently flicked cigarette lighter (yes, he’s a candle waiting to be lit) or a black-widow spider crawling up the stands of one particularly dangerous course. These are classic frenemies; their tale deserves more gas in the tank.
-
38Ron Howard's by-the-seat-of-your-pants aesthetic makes the slower, darker sequences feel hurried and bland, especially when stacked up next to the racing sequences.
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 33 out of 39
-
Mixed: 5 out of 39
-
Negative: 1 out of 39
-
Sep 20, 201310
-
Sep 20, 20139
-
Sep 20, 201310