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90A triumphant movie about failure.
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80Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx are on fire in the lead roles: They're both charismatic as hell without sacrificing any of the emotional honesty necessary for you to believe that these movie stars are a scruffy reporter and a mentally ill musician.
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80Intelligent and uncompromising, with knock-out performances from Downey Jr. and Foxx .
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80Mr. Wright and his colleagues have made a movie with a spaciousness of its own, a brave willingness to explore such mysteries of the mind and heart as the torture that madness can inflict, and the rapture that music can confer. Bravo to all concerned.
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75In the end, The Soloist isn't about BIG MOMENTS, it's about the grace notes, the kind that stay with you.
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75Downey gives a nervy, riveting performance in The Soloist.
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75This kind of movie quickly falls apart if the actors overplay the inherent sadness of the situation, and thankfully the stellar cast never makes that mistake.
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75Catherine Keener is also believable and sympathetic as Lopez's editor and former wife. But the film's power comes down to the strength of the two superb lead performances.
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75Isn't so much a story of perseverance and musical triumph as it is of despair, acceptance, and social commitment. The movie's a call to arms: We are our brothers' keepers, it says, and our brothers are in terrible shape.
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75The Soloist is based upon a true story, so it lacks some of the clichés that you might find in other made-up tales.
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75Foxx is magnificent, taking a role that could be exorbitantly showy (actors playing the mentally disabled tend to forget the word "restraint") and turning in a performance that's controlled and mesmerizing.
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75The Soloist does have the courage to be true to the real Ayers' fate at last, after the exaggerations end. And the smart, hard-working Foxx and Downey ensure that their scenes all stay grittily honest.
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75It's all a bit shapeless, yet made with sincerity and taste, and the two actors seize your sympathy.
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75The film works best when it focuses on the touching, crazymaking relationship between the two men.
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70Hollywood loves the heroics of good intentions, but this movie is just as interested in the road to hell.
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70I don't know if Beethoven and a sympathetic newspaper reporter can redeem a messy American city, but this movie makes a plausible case for so fervent a dream.
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67You can't help but feel a connection to Downey and Foxx and, to a lesser degree, a rooting interest in the story. But try as Wright might, he never figures out a way to bring us in -- much less manipulate us -- cinematically.
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63The Soloist has all the elements of an uplifting drama, except for the uplift.
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63This is the story of a complicated and fraught friendship, and I'm not sure Wright and his collaborators figured out how much Hollywood baloney and how much naturalistic grunge to apply to it.
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63The tone of The Soloist is wildly uneven. Though unsparing and unsentimental when framing the principals, Wright is hyperbolic when depicting the agitation of the mentally ill and the soothing rapture of music.
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63The problem with The Soloist is that, while Wright shows admirable restraint in dramatizing the interaction between the two principals and does not fall into the trap of following a "movie of the week" formula about mental illness, there is little emotional resonance in the story.
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60The film is imperfect, periodically if unsurprisingly sentimental, overly tidy and often very moving.
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50Like the prototypical "Shine," this is a film that romanticizes mental illness.
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50For all its sensitivity to the horrors of mental illness, The Soloist ends up as a fairly canned piece of work.
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50As a drama, The Soloist is stuck before it starts.
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50With all the hallmarks of a prestige picture, chief among them a great cast and creative crew and an "important" message, The Soloist plays its tune with a frequently heavy hand.
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50The movie is a noble enterprise, and Downey is stupendous as usual, but Joe Wright's direction is too slick to elicit much feeling.
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Foxx and Downey's disciplined duet come close to redeeming The Soloist from its visual excesses, but Wright leaves us with a parting shot of the dancing homeless that shamelessly exploits the very people he means to champion.
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50It's a handsomely mounted spectacle with moments of bravura acting that nonetheless feels labored and dull.
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50Has moments of power and imagination, but the overworked style and heavy socially conscious bent exude an off-putting sense of self-importance, making for a picture that's more of a chore than a pleasure to sit through.
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50The result feels cluttered, overcooked, and underfelt.
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40It's hard to talk about The Soloist without falling into cliches, because this well-meaning but ham-handed drama is full them.
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40By consistently and relentlessly overplaying everything, by settling for standard easy emotions when singular and heartfelt was called for, by pushing forward when they should have pulled back, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Susannah Grant have made the story mean less, not more. Instead of enhancing The Soloist's appeal, they have come close to eliminating it.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 25 out of 33
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Mixed: 2 out of 33
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Negative: 6 out of 33
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SusanS.10
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