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80This may be Bullock's best performance. Ever.
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75What makes The Blind Side a Thanksgiving treat is director Hancock's subtle touch and admirable refusal to yield to sports movie clichés, something he did previously with "The Rookie" and "Remember the Titans."
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75Grounded in the direct, disarming truth of their experience, the movie has a straightforward lack of cheap sentiment that saves it from being either too maudlin or saccharine-sweet.
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75In a head-to-head comparison, one would be hard-pressed not to declare that "Precious" is the better film - it makes fewer compromises and doesn't shy from showing the true ugliness only hinted at in this movie, but The Blind Side is more accessible. It's easier to digest. In the end, both films tell stories of triumph over adversity - a category of drama that uplifts while offering a dollop of social commentary.
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75Without restraint or subtlety, but with a lot of heart and energy, this movie tells a real-life tall tale.
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75One of the reasons it's so effective is because it's based on a real-life, odds-defying story: that of mountainous Baltimore Ravens offensive tackle Michael Oher (played by Quinton Aaron).
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75Best performance, minute for minute, comes from Adriane Lenox, whose cameo as Michael's drug-addled mother is the film's standout.
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70Bullock is an irrepressible hoot in writer-director John Lee Hancock's otherwise thoroughly conventional take on Michael Lewis' fact-based book "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game."
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70Wisely, Hancock has given the film as much humor as heart.
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70Uplifting and entertaining feel-good, fact-based sports drama.
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70The story is inspiring and involves sports, but to call it an inspirational sports story would be wrong; its real center is Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock in a fine performance), the strong-willed woman whose love and generosity helped turn a mute, hopeless boy with no social or academic skills into a functioning young man with a promising future.
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67It’s not an altogether convincing portrait, but it is an entertaining, even moving one, and the forcefulness of Bullock's presence goes a long way in pulling the film back from the brink of cuddliness.
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63An engaging if transparent tearjerker of the first water.
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63Has strong performances and stirring football scenes.
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63Bullock’s levelheaded acting frequently saves the movie from emotional garishness.
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63Michael as a character is defined almost solely by his helplessness and gratitude. He's as lovable as a lost puppy, but a more perceptive movie than The Blind Side would have let us see him from another angle.
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60Bullock delivers a towering performance that grabs the movie and the Oscar race by the scruff of the neck. You will be moved, but at the price of any nuance or complexity.
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60For all The Blind Side's flaws, it's impossible not to get caught up in Michael Oher's life.
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55Unlike the tale told in "Precious", however, The Blind Side's story is contrived, storybook sweet, credulity-straining and ... um, true.
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50Veers perilously close to the concept of poverty tourism.
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50Never dull, but it's rarely more than gently entertaining.
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50A football story that deserves a penalty flag every other play for piling on the sentiment.
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50It's fair to say that Bullock's appealing portrait of a strong-willed Tennessee belle ranks among the best work of her career. It's just too bad the movie around her comes up short.
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50A feel-good movie that never stops feeling good. The film is based on a true story (it was adapted from a nonfiction best-seller by Michael Lewis), but you never feel that Hancock has honestly captured what's true about it.
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50The film, not unsurprisingly for a holiday- (and football-) season release from a major Hollywood studio, plays this story straight down the middle, shedding nuance and complication in favor of maximum uplift.
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42A facile, feel-good fable that substitutes cliché for reality at nearly every turn.
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25Sports movies have a long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity. But The Blind Side, based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, finds a new low.
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20It’s just blinkered middle-class pandering at its most shameless.
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0Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.