Into the Wild

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Spellbinding.

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.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

A genuine odyssey: a journey to self-knowledge.

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.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

There's a bittersweet quality to McCandless' story that Penn captures intuitively.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Captivating and multifaceted.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Flawed but refreshingly intelligent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

From seductive start to shattering finish, the film is as stirring, entertaining and steadfastly thrilling as it is beautiful.

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.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

It’s half-crock and half-sublime, which seems about right for its subject.

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.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A gorgeously photographed and less intermittently fascinating 2 1/2-hour film.

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.

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.

Variety Dennis Harvey

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

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.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Penn is projecting heroic qualities onto a young guy who simply got in over his head.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.