| 100 |
Entertainment Weekly
Lords of Dogtown is a docudrama, rare in its grit and authenticity, that also strives for the mythical youth-rebel excitement of something like "8 Mile."
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| 80 |
The New York Times
From start to finish, is pretty much a blast.
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| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
As beautifully structured as one of the Z-Boys' graceful and intricate maneuvers. It is economic yet possesses depth and is visually striking, capturing an idea of what life is like in a very fast lane.
|
| 78 |
Austin Chronicle
Works best when it seems like it's not working at all.
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| 75 |
Rolling Stone
Hardwicke whips up a frenzy of crazy-cool board action, with Alva choreographing the stunts. Even when the slippery-slope-of-success cliches halt the film's momentum, the ready-to-rock actors rev it up again.
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| 75 |
USA Today
The skating scenes are their own reward: It's hard to think of a movie since 1950's "Sunset Boulevard" that has gotten more dramatic impact out of a pool.
|
| 75 |
Boston Globe
The movie is like a daydream, and it's most infectious when the characters are in motion or misbehaving, which is often.
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| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Peralta uses the creative liberties of fiction to focus on the one thing he couldn't convey in his historical record -- the sense of tribalism among skateboarders, who live by a code that most law-abiding citizens misunderstand for hooliganism.
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| 75 |
Portland Oregonian
Though the fiction doesn't quite equal the documentary in razzle-dazzle impact, it's a credible, handsome and engaging entertainment.
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| 70 |
Salon.com
There are times when even a director's worst impulses aren't enough to sink a movie, and somehow Lords of Dogtown stays afloat, largely because many of its actors transcend Hardwicke's heavy-handed storytelling.
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| 70 |
Newsweek
Devin Gordon
It's one of those juicy stories that have the added virtue of being true.
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| 67 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
An excellent documentary equal parts extreme sports and social anthropology.
|
| 63 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
The film doesn't hold together in any compelling way.
|
| 63 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
So the questions arises: Why bother watching the contrived fiction when the eye-popping fact is readily available? Answer: Why, indeed.
|
| 63 |
New York Post
Kyle Smith
The story meanders from competition to competition (up the ramps, down the ramps) and seems like it could end at any point. The characters are similarly underdeveloped.
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| 63 |
Baltimore Sun
Nearly everything fresh and exciting about the 2002 documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys" - the story of the Santa Monica-Ocean Park-Venice area misfits who revolutionized skateboarding in the 1970s - becomes studied and secondhand in The Lords of Dogtown.
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| 60 |
Dallas Observer
After trying to prove himself a serious actor in deadly dull movies, Ledger lightens up and brightens up a movie that attempts the trick of bringing a new spin to an old story but can't pull off the stunt.
|
| 60 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Takes a surprisingly gritty approach that gives the material some gravitas but also robs it of some of its fun.
|
| 60 |
Village Voice
Ed Halter
Hardwicke's pop-Cassavetes melodrama nevertheless rides as smoothly as a big-budget after-school special, capturing youth struggles from an appropriately blown-out teen's-eye perspective.
|
| 60 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
It's no surprise that when it ultimately tries to pluck at the heartstrings, it rings hollow. The film lives and dies by speed.
|
| 60 |
Empire
Alan Morrison
A hanging-out movie that’s as close as you’ll ever get to soaking up the time, the place and the attitude. Too slack for mainstream audiences, though.
|
| 50 |
Variety
It's a wipeout once the pic skids into melodrama and an overly schematic sense of how success tore the group apart.
|
| 50 |
LA Weekly
Unfortunately, whenever Ledger isn't onscreen, Lords of Dogtown takes a spill.
|
| 50 |
Miami Herald
Too much of Lords of Dogtown still feels conventional and sugar-coated.
|
| 50 |
Washington Post
Lords of Dogtown isn't a cop-out, but rather an ever-so-slight concession to commercialism.
|
| 50 |
ReelViews
Inept storytelling is one of Lords of Dogtown's great frustrations.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Tribune
The look and feel here is classic Hardwicke: gritty and dark, so as to fool you into thinking this film is serious business.
|
| 50 |
Charlotte Observer
The new film, superficial and chaotic, delivers a rough sense of place, a reasonable number of skateboard thrills and very little character development or story.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Although Catherine Hardwicke, the director of Lords of Dogtown, has a good sense for the period and does what she can with her actors, we've seen the originals, and these aren't the originals.
|
| 50 |
TV Guide
The skating photography is excellent and, like the documentary's soundtrack, songs from the Stooges, Blue Oyster Cult and the Weirdos set the proper mood. But this dramatization does nothing Peralta's documentary didn't do better.
|
| 50 |
Premiere
Lords of Dogtown may pop for the skateboarding crowd. It fizzles for the rest.
|
| 40 |
Wall Street Journal
If Lords of Dogtown accomplishes nothing else, it shows how hard writing a fiction film can be, and what a vast artistic distance can stand between a bad fiction film and the first-rate documentary that inspired it.
|
| 38 |
New York Daily News
A tormented dramatization of the exact same events, and it's as bad as the earlier film ("Dogtown and Z-Boys") was good.
|
| 30 |
Chicago Reader
Excruciatingly narcissistic.
|
| 20 |
Washington Post
Has all the energy and spontaneity of a bowl of waxed fruit. If watching "Dogtown and Z-Boys" was tantamount to witnessing history itself, watching "Lords of Dogtown," which Peralta wrote, feels more like watching a stiff, meticulously choreographed reenactment.
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