| 100 |
New York Daily News
Writers Kirk Ellis and Michelle Ashford do justice to McCullough's narration, and director Tom Hooper has a straightforward style that gives flesh-and-blood dimension to names from history books. Best of all are two extraordinary performances at the center: Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as his wife, Abigail. |
| 100 |
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Rob Owen
Credit for building drama goes to screenwriter Kirk Ellis ("Into the West") and actor Paul Giamatti ("Sideways"). His intellectual, vain Adams is a reluctant rebel, tentative in his support of an American revolution, wary of insurgency and mob rule and defender of the tenets of American democracy. |
| 100 |
San Jose Mercury News Charlie McCollum
It manages to be a rousing piece of filmmaking, a fascinating character study and a largely accurate presentation of the time when America was born. |
| 91 |
Entertainment Weekly Ken Tucker
Who says TV doesn't make history thought-provokingly exciting? |
| 90 |
TV Guide Matt Roush
John Adams, based on David McCullough's acclaimed biography, is as sumptuous and satisfying as TV gets: gorgeously produced, marvelously acted and written with a sense of high drama amid generous displays of wit. |
| 90 |
Hollywood Reporter Barry Garron
This handsome miniseries is praiseworthy on many levels--as history, as entertainment and as a way to bring to life for new generations a sense of the sacrifice and heroism needed to establish the U.S. |
| 90 |
LA Weekly Robert Abele
A rich, intelligent and often moving miniseries. |
| 90 |
Baltimore Sun David Zurawik
John Adams, a $100 million-plus production about the life and times of America's second president, is one of the most compelling miniseries of the decade. |
| 90 |
Washington Post Tom Shales
John Adams is the kind of classily intelligent production that can be happily recommended to everybody. The filmmakers, including executive producer Tom Hanks, have attempted to re-create and enliven history--and they succeed grandly. |
| 90 |
Philadelphia Inquirer Jonathan Storm
The monumental production is worth bragging about. |
| 80 |
Miami Herald Glenn Garvin
Ellis has used Adams' works to create a wondrously full and nuanced portrait of the man, which is brought fully to life by Paul Giamatti. |
| 80 |
Chicago Tribune Maureen Ryan
Both the book and the miniseries sketch admirably human portraits of historical figures such as Adams, Jefferson and Franklin. |
| 80 |
New York Magazine John Leonard
We’re in excellent company, from the Boston Massacre to the Declaration of Independence to Adams’s plenipotentiary missions to Versailles and the Court of St. James to his unsought but extremely gratifying vice-presidency in the first Washington administration. |
| 80 |
Wall Street Journal Nancy DeWolf Smith
It is not an exaggeration to say that the effect is of opening a treasure chest and being showered with its riches. |
| 80 |
Boston Globe Matthew Gilbert
It is reverent enough, and profoundly heroic; and yet it is a living, breathing piece of work that brings American history down to earth. |
| 75 |
New York Post Adam Buckman
Though the miniseries represents a compressed and not entirely accurate history, it is moving enough to remind us of the sacrifices made by Adams and a great many other people to form a republic against almost impossible odds. |
| 75 |
Chicago Sun-Times Misha Davenport
While John Adams succeeds as entertainment, it utterly fails as a history lesson. |
| 70 |
Slate Troy Patterson
Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson ) enlivens the painterly prettiness and dutiful solemnity of John Adams with a healthy sense of the vulgar, as in the vernacular, as in the native voice of America. |
| 70 |
Salon Heather Havrilesky
Far from epic, John Adams is a biopic as intense and moody as the man himself. |
| 70 |
Variety Brian Lowry
The adaptation is meticulous almost to a fault, including a fidelity to language and accents (a hybrid between British and American) that initially appears to handcuff some of the cast --beginning, most glaringly, with Giamatti, fresh off his turn as a jollier icon in "Fred Claus." |
| 70 |
The New Yorker Jill Lepore
At its best, the storytelling itself manages to accommodate a sense of historical contingency. |
| 70 |
Orlando Sentinel Hal Boedeker
The production, based on David McCullough's biography, unfolds as a lavish, sometimes stilted history lesson. The private story of the Adams family is more intriguing and fresh. |
| 63 |
USA Today Robert Bianco
Sadly, in this elaborately produced, incredibly well-intentioned seven-part HBO miniseries adaptation of the book, Adams recedes once again, outshone not just by his more famous peers but also by just about every minor character. |
| 60 |
The New York Times Alessandra Stanley
John Adams is the weakest part of John Adams. |
| 50 |
Los Angeles Times Mary McNamara
Unfortunately, so smitten are the creators of John Adams with historical earnestness and pedigree they seem to have forgotten how to tell a good story. |
| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle Tim Goodman
But this is an epic drama on HBO, correct? So is it Giamatti or Adams himself who will make viewers wish for a swifter and less pedantic version on the History Channel? |
| 50 |
Newark Star-Ledger Alan Sepinwall
There are moments when John Adams stirs up the passion its author clearly had for the subject -- Adams firing off a rifle in the middle of a battle at sea with a British warship, the first public reading of the Declaration, George Washington (David Morse, in the second-best piece of casting other than Giamatti) whispering his oath of office at his inauguration -- but too often it's just as muddy and dull as its subject was accused of being. |
