Advanced Search Beta »
Basic Search Fields
The Nativity Story
Metascore
52 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 28 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 10 out of 28
  2. Mixed: 15 out of 28
  3. Negative: 3 out of 28
view
per page
  1. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Kirk Honeycutt
    80
    Unfolds in a scrupulously accurate historical adventure story that depicts the world of Jesus' birth with an exciting you-are-there verisimilitude.
  2. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Wilmington
    75
    The Nativity Story surprised me. I didn't expect such an obvious art film approach. Yet the Bible, in the King James version, is great English literature.
  3. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Carrie Rickey
    75
    Isaac's emotional performance as the man who learns to share the woman he loves with the God he worships is profoundly moving and gives the movie its heart.
  4. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Mick LaSalle
    75
    By grounding everything that went before in an earthy realism, Hardwicke earns the elevation of the nativity sequence, one of the more beautiful scenes in this year's cinema.
  5. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    70
    At its best, The Nativity Story shares with "Hail Mary" an interest in finding a kernel of realism in the old story of a pregnant teenager in hard times. Buried in the pageantry, in other words, is an interesting movie.
  6. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: J.R. Jones
    70
    Compared to the crucifixion, the nativity doesn't offer as much inherent drama for secular viewers, but screenwriter Mike Rich (The Rookie) generates a fair amount of suspense by framing the action with Herod's slaughter of the innocents, and the journey of the Three Wise Men supplies a warm comedic subplot.
  7. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: William Arnold
    67
    It's a handsome production, nicely shot by Elliot Davis on Italian and Moroccan locations, with a performance by Castle-Hughes ("Whale Rider") as the Virgin that's so pleasing and minimalist it could have been lifted from a fresco by Giotto.
  8. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    63
    Slow, solemn going, despite its best efforts at thundering soldiers and comic-relief kings.
  9. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    63
    In a real sense, Nativity Story is the female other to Gibson's "Passion": Dedicated to life rather than death, it's suffused with a sense of the womanly divine.
  10. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Rick Groen
    63
    Don't expect a Caravaggio, but if your taste turns to Hallmark, this is a good bet -- a straight-up Nativity story as safe as death and taxes.
  11. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Stephanie Zacharek
    60
    I have to hand it to Hardwicke: I was a lot less bored by The Nativity Story than I feared I'd be.
  12. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Scott Foundas
    60
    There are a few quietly affecting scenes here, in which we see Mary and Joseph as the terribly frightened newlyweds they probably were, unsure of what to make of their extraordinary circumstances. But too often, the actors register as little more than set dressing and, despite Hardwicke's resolve to give us the realNativity as we've never seen it before, much of the movie smacks of convention.
  13. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    58
    It's a rather lifeless re-telling of the Nativity, with greeting-card imagery and stiff performances.
  14. Baltimore Sun
    Reviewed by: Chris Kaltenbach
    58
    Other than portraying Mary as an overwhelmed teenager, mystified that God has chosen her to be the mother of his child, it doesn't offer anything that hasn't been playing out in grade-school pageants for decades.
  15. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Keith Phipps
    58
    A filmed Sunday-school lesson that favors a dry, by-the-Book approach over even a suggestion of dramatic interpretation. It's more Christmas pageant than movie.
  16. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jack Mathews
    50
    As dull and inert as the ink used to print the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that informed Mike Rich's script.
  17. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    50
    As a piece of religious instruction or an animated version of a crèche, it accomplishes its aims. As a movie, however, it's slow, plodding, and not terribly interesting.
  18. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    50
    This is not a chance to "experience the most timeless of stories as you've never seen it before" but just the opposite: an opportunity, for those who want it, to encounter this story exactly the way it's almost always been told.
  19. Variety
    Reviewed by: Todd McCarthy
    50
    Memories of dreary Sunday school classes come flooding back courtesy of The Nativity Story.
  20. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Ann Hornaday
    50
    This drab exercise in glum piety slumps where it should soar, sapping the story of its mystery and transcendence with an overriding sense of literality.
  21. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    42
    The Nativity Story is a film of tame picture-book sincerity, but that's not the same thing as devotion. The movie is too tepid to feel, or see, the light.
  22. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: M. E. Russell
    42
    Other than its overwrought Herod-Antipas scenes, The Nativity Story sticks so closely to the text that it's a total snooze.
  23. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Pete Vonder Haar
    40
    For an origin story about one of the most compelling and important characters in history, The Nativity Story is pretty damn boring.
  24. Empire
    Reviewed by: Ian Freer
    40
    Surprisingly sedate telling of the rather well-known tale from Catherine Hardwicke.
  25. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Toddy Burton
    40
    The story is good, but the execution favors the safe over the challenging. Personally, I'd rather just read the Bible.
  26. Slate
    Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
    30
    Fatuous, sappy, and dull.
  27. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Connie Ogle
    25
    A star rises in the east. A savior is born. Two thousand years later, a surprisingly dull film is made.
  28. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Lou Lumenick
    25
    A deadly dull, by-the-numbers rendition of the Nativity story.
prev next
Page:
  • 1

User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
7.6 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 36 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 17 out of 22
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 22
  3. Negative: 4 out of 22
  1. MarkBayer
    8
    Filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke's relentlessly supercharged, passionate work on Thirteen, the downbeat but compelling story of a teenager's drug- and peer-pressure-fueled downward spiral, not only prevented it from potentially becoming this generation's answer to Reefer Madness but made it the most excitingly directed film of 2003. Unfortunately, Hardwicke then tried to repeat the jump-cut magic in 2005's Lords of Dogtown; the result was an instantly outdated disaster which at best made hundreds of moviegoers want to e-mail 1970s skateboarding wunderkind Stacy Peralta suggesting that he quit dwelling in the past and get a life already. Clearly Hardwicke needed to make a stylistic change, and I suspect that she took on The Nativity Story partially as a professional challenge: how could she tell the simplest, best-known--and to many, many people, the greatest--story of all time, employing the restraint it demands and yet still making it compelling? Very successfully, it turns out: Hardwicke's retelling of the birth of Jesus Christ isn't flashy at all, but it's extremely enjoyable, and all her moves are right on the money: her production designer's eye for the visual and dramatic value of rocky terrain, which makes this a consistently terrific-looking film (especially given its mid-size budget); her charming and tasteful use of the Three Wise Men as light comic relief, and especially her acknowledgement of what over half the globe already knows: that Jesus' earthly parents (and fellow townspeople) had complexions that were somewhat darker than the color of a piece of Bazooka bubble gum. And given that we all know how the story ends, it's truly surprising how much suspense and dramatic tension Hardwicke brings to its climax: when you realize the urgency with which Mary and Joseph needed to find an inn, a stable or someplace else so that Mary could not only have the baby but HAVE! THE! BABY! NOW!! you know that this is a movie that not only had to have been made by a woman, but by a mom. All of this should've made The Nativity Story a sure thing for believer, neophyte and secularist moviegoers alike, so why did it disappoint at the box office? My guess is that New Line was too limited in its marketing approach, relying too heavily on a Karl Rove "go for your base" strategy rather than employing Howard Dean's recently triumphant "50 states" one. Leaving aside those cheesy $1.98 mini-epics dealing with the end of this world and the beginning of the next one that conservative reviewers are always trying to convince us ended up more in the black than Star Wars did, the reality is that faith-based movie hits are born, not made. The two unqualified smashes of this relatively new genre over the last few years did well because, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur in earlier generations, they skewed across the board: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ benefited from lots of pre-release buzz owing to its sensationalistic subject matter and controversial treatment, while Disney's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, while not ignoring the Christian subtext, was first and foremost an engaging, skillfully told adaptation of a beloved children's classic. At least I'd rather buy into that theory than believe that droves of churchgoers stayed away from Nativity because its Mary, Whale Rider's Keisha Castle-Hughes, identified a little too closely for some tastes to her role by getting pregnant at a very tender age. If that indeed was the case, then these individuals need to remind themselves of something that The Nativity Story's subject grew up to say about trying to take the speck out of someone else's eye when you've already got a beam in your own!… Full Review »
  2. ellab
    10
    Grace is a quiet poetry that Catherine Hardwicke puts into pictures. The surprise is in the tremendously nuanced portrayals by Castle-Hughes and Issac (Mary and Joseph). To portray holier-than-thou icons with humanity and vulnerability is a brave and remarkable choice. Perhaps bolder than the Passion, where doubt is absent and the cinematic draw of epic violence over the emotional accessibility of the every-man leap of faith that we forget that we are all capable of each day in our choices of who we love, how we parent, how we choose to conduct ourselves each day. Kudos to the filmmakers for not selling out for a Hollywood high-octane version of a story that has its grace and its power in the daring of humble, real people with humor and fear to make a choice based on their faith, and not on glory. I hope that the subtlety of what a powerful choice the respect for the characters bravery and not cinematic spectacle is not lost on the audience. In my afternoon screening, I saw men and women look to the screen with tears in their eyes, and I hope the film inspires many to trust the quiet srength of the individual that is all but lost in our lives barraged with violence and information. It is an island of peace and hope in an ocean of self-doubt and self-obsession. See for yourself.… Full Review »
  3. ShawnO.
    10
    I liked the fact that it stayed true to scripture, without adding, just to make it more hollywood. It is what it is, critics love to beat up christian movies. To the non christian, its easy to pick on something, thats material is over 2000 yrs old, but to a christain who dedicates his life to Christ its awe-inspiring. Hopefully this film will be a big sucess, so we can have more biblical pictures to go see. Like life of Paul.… Full Review »
See all user reviews »