|

New This Week
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search
Upcoming Release Calendar
Awards & Bests By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

63
11th Hour, The
47
27 Dresses
29
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
39
Alvin and the Chipmunks
81
Bamako
84
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
47
Bella
68
Business of Being Born, The
69
Charlie Wilson's War
64
Cloverfield
30
Cover
68
Delirious
92
Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The
43
Final Season, The
41
First Sunday
51
Golden Compass, The
49
Good Night, The
65
Great Debaters, The
63
Hannah Takes the Stairs
52
Hollywood Dreams
7
Hottie and the Nottie, The
60
I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
15
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
81
Juno
70
Lars and the Real Girl
47
Lions for Lambs
41
Mad Money
71
Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
xx
Moondance Alexander
53
Music Within
77
Nanking
44
Nina's Heavenly Delights
24
One Missed Call
74
Orphanage, The
30
Over Her Dead Body
39
P.S. I Love You
37
P2
46
Reservation Road
55
Resurrecting the Champ
57
Romulus, My Father
85
Savages, The
78
Starting Out in the Evening
83
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
57
Teeth
92
There Will Be Blood
38
Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
32
Untraceable
63
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
68
War Dance
71
Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, The
43
Youth Without Youth
92
Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The
92
There Will Be Blood
85
Savages, The
84
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
83
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
81
Juno
81
Bamako
78
Starting Out in the Evening
77
Nanking
74
Orphanage, The
71
Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, The
71
Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
70
Lars and the Real Girl
69
Charlie Wilson's War
68
Business of Being Born, The
68
Delirious
68
War Dance
65
Great Debaters, The
64
Cloverfield
63
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
63
11th Hour, The
63
Hannah Takes the Stairs
60
I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
57
Romulus, My Father
57
Teeth
55
Resurrecting the Champ
53
Music Within
52
Hollywood Dreams
51
Golden Compass, The
49
Good Night, The
47
Bella
47
Lions for Lambs
47
27 Dresses
46
Reservation Road
44
Nina's Heavenly Delights
43
Youth Without Youth
43
Final Season, The
41
Mad Money
41
First Sunday
39
Alvin and the Chipmunks
39
P.S. I Love You
38
Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
37
P2
32
Untraceable
30
Over Her Dead Body
30
Cover
29
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
24
One Missed Call
15
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
7
Hottie and the Nottie, The
xx
Moondance Alexander
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Into the Wild
Paramount Vantage
FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for language and some nudity
Starring
Emile Hirsch,
Vince Vaughn,
Marcia Gay Harden,
William Hurt,
and
Catherine Keener
Freshly graduated from college and with a promising future ahead, 22-year-old Christopher McCandless chose instead to walk out of his privileged life and into the wild in search of adventure. What happened to him on the way transformed this young wanderer into an enduring symbol for countless people. Was Christopher McCandless a heroic adventurer or a naïve idealist, a rebellious 1990s Thoreau or another lost American son, a fearless risk-taker or a tragic figure who wrestled with the precarious balance between man and nature? (Paramount Vantage)
| GENRE(S): |
Adventure
|
Drama
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Jon Krakauer (book)
Sean Penn
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Sean Penn
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: March 4, 2008
Theatrical: September 21, 2007
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
140 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 Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
Spellbinding.

100
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
Penn's direction is amazingly sharp and intuitive, full of masterful touches that give an epic dimension and scope to the parable.

100
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
A genuine odyssey: a journey to self-knowledge.

91
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
The beauty of Into the Wild, which Penn has written and directed with magnificent precision and imaginative grace, is that what Christopher is running from is never as important as what he's running TO.

91
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Scott Tobias
There's a bittersweet quality to McCandless' story that Penn captures intuitively.

90
Village Voice
Scott Foundas
To these eyes, Into the Wild is an unusually soulful and poetic movie that crystallizes McCandless in all his glittering enigma, and allows us to decide for ourselves whether he was the spiritual son of Thoreau, Tolstoy, and John Muir, or the boy most likely to become Theodore Kaczynski.

90
Film Threat
Pete Vonder Haar
If nothing else, Into the Wild is a beautiful film. Penn meticulously shot in the actual locations McCandless visited, and Eric Gautier's cinematography is breathtaking, many scenes are framed in such a way as to almost Hirsch entirely, further emphasizing how solitary his trek actually was.

90
Washington Post
Ann Hornaday
Sean Penn sings a powerful and poetic hymn to America with Into the Wild, his sweeping, sensitive and deeply affecting adaptation of Jon Krakauer's best-selling book.

88
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
They are the only misstep in Penn's otherwise sure-footed journey to what he reveals as the heart of lightness.

88
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
Into the Wild is a beautifully made motion picture and some of the segments (especially those with Hal Holbrook and those that transpire around "the magic bus" in Alaska) are powerful.

88
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
Penn, in tandem with the superb cinematographer Eric Gautier (The Motorcycle Diaries), captures the majesty and terror of the wilderness in ways that make you catch your breath.

88
USA Today
Claudia Puig
Captivating and multifaceted.

88
TV Guide
Ken Fox
Flawed but refreshingly intelligent.

88
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
Penn, one of Hollywood's most famous iconoclasts, must have felt instinctive sympathy with someone who told the whole world in general to leave him alone.

83
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
Feels like a lost film from the '60s in the very best way: unstructured and intrepid and free. As a result, it's sometimes a little indulgent and overlong. But, like its hero, it's never less than sincere in its search for truth and beauty, even as it stares death in the eye.

80
Empire
Dan Jolin
With the whole of America as his backdrop, Penn pulls off his most ambitious movie yet. The result is a beautiful and thought-provoking road movie.

80
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
Though Penn's fierce identification with the protagonist is a key source for the film's accomplishments, Into the Wild succeeds on screen because Hirsch ("Alpha Dog," "The Lords of Dogtown") throws himself into the part without reservation, projecting an appealing openness and life force that brings a special poignancy to his fate.

80
The New York Times
A.O. Scott
Though the film?s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but.

80
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
From seductive start to shattering finish, the film is as stirring, entertaining and steadfastly thrilling as it is beautiful.

75
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
A big leap forward for Penn as a director and deserves to be one of the most talked about films of the season.

75
Chicago Tribune
Michael Phillips
It?s half-crock and half-sublime, which seems about right for its subject.

75
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
One such paradox, which Into the Wild doesn't note, is that those who flee civilization more often than not bring it with them. The bus in which Christopher McCandless died is now a tourist destination.

75
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
A gorgeously photographed and less intermittently fascinating 2 1/2-hour film.

75
Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer
Penn has a real feeling for the stray moments in life that suddenly rush up and overwhelm us with emotion. He also has an eye for beauty in the wilds, of which this film has many. And he's very good with actors. What he lacks is a sharper eye for the wooziness of romanticism, and that wooziness, despite some truly breathtaking moments, infuses Into the Wild.

75
Premiere
Glenn Kenny
Penn has often said that he dislikes acting and would prefer to direct full time. Into the Wild is impressive enough to give him license to do just that.

70
Variety
Dennis Harvey
Sean Penn delivers a compelling, ambitious work that will satisfy most admirers of the book.

67
Austin Chronicle
Josh Rosenblatt
The character never really comes alive, and I walked away from Into the Wild feeling that Penn was too in love with the idea of Christopher McCandless the free-spirited hero to excavate the soul of Christopher McCandless the lost man.

63
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
Penn is projecting heroic qualities onto a young guy who simply got in over his head.

63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Rick Groen
The result is a road movie with a lofty message that too frequently gets lost in its own thematic barrens.

63
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
The movie tries its hardest to celebrate the impetuousness of its hero and the exhilaration of his accomplishments. Mostly, though, it just reminds you of the severity of his mistakes.

60
The Hollywood Reporter
Sura Wood
Penn opts for epic proportions and clutters his narrative with gimmicks. For the most part, it works. What's missing is the perspective and insight that would illuminated the inner dimensions of a driven young man who is preachy and downright irritating.

60
Salon.com
Stephanie Zacharek
If nature -- if life -- is as wild and precious as the movie makes it out to be, Hirsch needs to give us something, someone, to watch on-screen. We need to feel a presence before we can take the measure of an absence.

50
Newsweek
David Ansen
Penn's eye for landscapes is stunning, and his affection for outsider lifestyles is tangible. Hirsch, who carries the film on his increasingly emaciated shoulders, performs heroically, but there's an edge missing. The ideal casting would have been the young Sean Penn.

50
Time
Richard Schickel
I think the central mistake of this film derives from its lack of irony, a sense it refuses to impart that the world may not be exactly as the zealous Christopher perceives it to be. The film needs at least to entertain the possibility that its protagonist was driven less by high principle than by lamentable screwiness. And we need to leave it carrying some sense of tragic consequence with us. Instead, we're simply glad to be finished, at last, with this annoying man-child.

50
New York Magazine
David Edelstein
With all the narration and fits of slow motion, the movie seems like the work of a nervous chain-smoker. It lacks concentration--and with it, the potential for rapture.

50
The New Yorker
David Denby
Sean Penn?s Into the Wild is certainly visual--it?s entirely too visual, to the point of being cheaply lyrical.

50
Slate
Dana Stevens
It's hard not to feel that Penn is stacking the deck heavily in his favor and losing out on the chance for a more sober meditation on the ambiguity of McCandless' quest.

50
Chicago Reader
Andrea Gronvall
A murky screenplay leaves most of the humans ciphers, save for Hal Holbrook in an exquisitely calibrated performance as the avuncular desert retiree whose advice McCandless should have heeded.


The average user rating for this movie is 8.0 (out of 10) based on 118 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Read more user comments...
Discuss this movie in our forums |