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91Near letter-perfect.
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88It's also very cleverly edited - one scene will often branching off from another in much the same way a crossword puzzle works - and features a bang-up ending that will actually leave you cheering over a word game.
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88If it's challenges you're after, forget cracking "The Da Vinci Code." Wordplay captures the exhilaration that comes from navigating the ins and outs of complex puzzles.
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88When I first heard about Wordplay, I assumed I wouldn't have an ort of interest.
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83At times the film resembles a promo for Shortz and the Times, and the celebrity puzzlers, who include filmmaker Ken Burns, Bill Clinton, and the Indigo Girls, have an unfortunate tendency to bloviate. Not so Jon Stewart, who seems to regard each Times puzzle as an opportunity to go mano a mano with Shortz.
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In Creadon's most effective and inspired sequence, he gets Reagle to create a puzzle using the film's title as its theme. It's during the sequence that we learn the lofty rules of creating crosswords, including lateral symmetry and a maximum ratio of black to white space.
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Whatever the documentary's flaws, the filmmakers should be saluted for giving us a rare glimpse of life in these trenches.
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80This film is as smart and funny as its topic and its stars.
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80What's an eight-letter word for a non-fiction feature that is witty, wise and wonderful? "Wordplay."
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78The fact that Wordplay works as a film at all is a testament to its skill. The New York Times may never find a better marketing tool.
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75There's more palm-sweating suspense in one minute of this baby than in all of "The Omen."
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75The film is made with a lot of style and visual ingenuity.
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There's genuine suspense and a lot of humor.
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75Manages to turn an internal, solitary activity into fodder for an engaging, even exciting movie.
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75In this documentary, I learn there are people who can solve a Monday New York Times puzzle in less than three minutes - without looking words up! I don't necessarily want to know these people, but they put on a good show at the annual crossword championship in Stamford, Ct., which is the centerpiece of this affectionate, smartly-done promo for puzzling.
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75As someone who has never completed a crossword puzzle, I was surprised how engaged I was by Wordplay.
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75Opens up a world of words.
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75Ultimately, Wordplay is best enjoyed as an engaging look at a little-known subculture.
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75It's light, it's bright and it succeeds precisely where the lesser doc fails -- by setting modest targets and hitting them square on.
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75Shortz's gentle manner and French-foreign-agent mustache go a long way toward making him a thinking girl's pinup nerd - and this despite the man's pitiless insistence on making the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle ''tough as a _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.''
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75In breezy fashion, it introduces us to a handful of crossword savants, the history of crossword puzzles, a number of celebrity crossword addicts...
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75The film's subjects are almost uniformly likable, self-deprecating, funny, and hyper-verbal, and their peculiar passion for crosswords and the sense of genial camaraderie among buffs proves surprisingly infectious.
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While puzzles are not most peoples' lives, they are truly an essential part. Wordplay goes up/down and across on the varied reasons why more than 50 million Americans do a crossword puzzle every week.
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70At its best when Creadon is burrowing deep into the world of the puzzles themselves, particularly when he sits down with puzzle constructor extraordinaire Merl Reagle.
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Niceness also takes the edge off Patrick Creadon's otherwise revitalizing documentary.
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70Wordplay offers a running tutorial in how crosswords are created - lessons that are enhanced by the onscreen graphics of designer Brian Oakes, which, come tournament time, allow moviegoers to see the clues and grids the contestants are working on, theoretically allowing us to solve the puzzles along with them.
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70Another doc sharing some of its cultural DNA, the spelling-bee melodrama Spellbound, had children, families, social conventions--Creadon's film has only words and people with a little time to waste.
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70Mostly it's just a sweet and lightly funny piece of highbrow piffle, as enjoyable as it is forgettable. There's no harm done, but there's not much else either.
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70Delightful.
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70Punsters, linguists and crossword puzzle fanatics everywhere couldn't ask for a more bracing tribute than helmer Patrick Creadon's buoyant and exhilaratingly brainy documentary Wordplay.
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70Creadon and his editor, Douglas Blush, add verve to an otherwise talky exercise by cutting Wordplay as if it were a puzzle itself, with Across and Down camera moves and blocks of black space. A visual pun altogether worthy of those being filled in on screen.
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63In segments such as the Reagle and Clinton interviews, where character is revealed via puzzle style, Wordplay succeeds. The film is less successful when it travels to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
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63Sweet, indulgent, and surprisingly soft in the center; the most minor entry in the brainiac-doc genre to date, it's nevertheless a perfectly entertaining hour and a half for crossword adepts.
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60Wordplay is...well...just about as exciting as a feature length movie about people solving crossword puzzles can be. Not very.
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60This is mildly entertaining, though like the puzzles themselves, it favors diversion over wisdom.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 5 out of 6
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Mixed: 1 out of 6
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Negative: 0 out of 6
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LdH.9It's puzzling that such an entertaining movie should have such a small audience.
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MarcK.5
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JimG.6