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Friday Night Lights
Universal Pictures
FILM:
TV:
MPAA RATING: PG-13 for thematic issues, sexual content, language, some teen drinking and rough sports action
Starring
Billy Bob Thornton,
Lucas Black,
Garrett Hedlund,
Derek Luke,
Jay Hernandez,
Lee Jackson,
Lee Thompson Young, Tim McGraw,
and
Connie Britton
A true American story of a group of young athletes, their town and their dreams. (Universal)
| GENRE(S): |
Action
|
Drama
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
David Aaron Cohen
Peter Berg
Buzz Bissinger (book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream)
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Peter Berg
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: January 18, 2005
Video: January 18, 2005
Theatrical: October 8, 2004
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
117 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
100
Chicago Tribune
Allison Benedikt
There isn't a bad performance here, but besides Thornton, Luke stands out.
100
Empire
Ian Nathan
The best sports movie for years, as it's not about sport at all. Forget fears of jingoistic grandstanding, this is an un-American all-American tale that deserves attention.
90
Newsweek
David Ansen
Few films have shown so powerfully the slashing double edge of sports fever.
88
USA Today
Mike Clark
One of the best football movies ever, Nights in the end celebrates the game.
88
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
The movie demonstrates the power of sports to involve us; we don't live in Odessa and are watching a game played 16 years ago, and we get all wound up.
88
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
A smart, sharp, stirring adaptation of the H.G. Bissinger best-seller.
83
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Thornton, giving a splendid, disciplined performance, seamlessly shapes his coach into a believable man of quality rather than star-size charisma.
80
Dallas Observer
Robert Wilonsky
The movie works because Berg never forgets to keep his heart in the game and not just his head.
80
LA Weekly
Ron Stringer
Country singer and sometime actor Tim McGraw excels as the bitter, besotted ex-Panther who can't cut his kid enough slack to follow his own game plan.
80
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
The film lets you get caught up in the excitement of this religion and the addictive nature of those stadium lights. Berg and cinematographer Tobias Schliessler get up close to the action, catching the hits and miscues in all their violent urgency.
80
Chicago Reader
Andrea Gronvall
Captures all the action of a tumultuous season while showing the emotional toll on the players.
80
Village Voice
Benjamin Strong
Director Peter Berg, an actor himself, gets quietly excruciated performances from the team members.
75
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
Compelling.
75
Boston Globe
Staff (Not credited)
It also bears something you rarely experience in a football movie. Friday Night Lights has a soul.
75
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
Berg's picture is certainly an above average effort that provides a solid emotional punch.
75
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
Thornton gets inside the coach's skin. It's a subtle, soulful performance in a movie that otherwise goes for the jugular.
75
New York Daily News
Robert Dominguez
Rousing, action-packed.
75
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
The film goes for a grainy, fast-cut, documentary look that is both a blessing and a curse.
70
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
For all its energy, fine performances and dramatic confrontations, Friday Night Lights substitutes intensity for insight, dodging the book's harsher findings like a dazzling broken-field runner.
70
Variety
Todd McCarthy
Friday Night Lights is the "Black Hawk Down" of high school football movies. As exclusively as Ridley Scott's picture was about combat, this film concerns football and nothing but.
70
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Keith Phipps
When Friday Night Lights gets to the big games, the time it's spent creates an atmosphere thick with tension, one akin to the real-world experience of watching a favorite team play for its life.
70
The New York Times
Dana Stevens
Uplifting and troubling, partly because it is more honest than most sports movies about the high cost and short life span of high school football glory.
70
Washington Post
Michael O'Sullivan
Honest because it gets a paradoxical truth: There's more to life than football, even when there isn't.
70
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
Real enough around the edges to hold our attention even if it sacrifices accuracy for storytelling ease.
70
TV Guide
Angel Cohn
Stands out by virtue of its impressive visual style and the filmmakers' decision not to massage the facts into cliched conflicts with neat, feel-good resolutions that produce the proper sense of uplift.
70
Washington Post
Sean Daly
Give credit to Berg for keeping Bissinger's all-too-true ending intact. It's a doozy.
67
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
The game footage is as engrossing as the real thing, although it comes at the expense of diminished attention to the teen players and their emotional problems.
63
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
The last half hour devoted to the Big Game, staged by a crew from NFL films, is genuinely rousing and inspiring. That's where Friday Night Lights finally shines.
63
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
It's all amiably hackneyed, but it sucks you in anyway.
63
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
It's a passably made, grittily acted slice of life in Texas that veers not an inch from the norm for this sort of picture.
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Rick Groen
In the deck of clichés that is the typical sports movie, it at least does us the courtesy of shuffling the cards a little.
60
Film Threat
Rick Kisonak
The film also benefits from unusually solid writing and a masterfully understated turn by Billy Bob Thornton.
58
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
Acted with earnest commitment and scored and edited with jazzy, laconic grace, "Lights" tells us absolutely nothing we haven't heard before -- and often -- in sports films
50
Baltimore Sun
Chris Kaltenbach
Too much about the game and not enough about the town, the players and everything else.
40
Salon.com
Charles Taylor
There's some good acting in this mess.
 The average user rating for this movie is 6.7 (out of 10) based on 74 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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