DVD
Upcoming Release Calendar
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Recent DVD/Video Releases
65
Adoration
42
Aliens in the Attic
56
American Violet
44
Answer Man, The
82
Anvil! The Story of Anvil![]()
54
Bruno
55
Casi Divas
63
Cheri
83
Drag Me to Hell![]()
24
Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat
76
Every Little Step
70
Fados
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
74
Humpday
32
I Love You, Beth Cooper
50
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
81
Il Divo![]()
54
Is Anybody There?
32
Land of the Lost
74
Lemon Tree
40
Limits of Control, The
43
Love 'N Dancing
63
Medicine for Melancholy
34
My Life in Ruins
51
My Sister's Keeper
48
Not Forgotten
76
Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
50
Nothing Like the Holidays
26
Objective, The
42
Orphan
78
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
48
Proposal, The
39
Spread
83
Star Trek![]()
55
Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, The
72
Thirst
35
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
28
Ugly Truth, The
66
Unmistaken Child
88
Up![]()
45
Whatever Works
34
Year One
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Ragtime

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 8 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 0 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Art/Independent | Drama
Written by:
Michael Weller and Heinrich von Kleist
Michael Kohlhaas (story)
E.L. Doctorow (novel)
Directed by: Milos Forman
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 20, 1981
DVD: November 16, 2004
Running Time: 155 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG
Starring James Cagney, Brad Dourif, Moses Gunn, Elizabeth McGovern, and Kenneth McMillan
Set in the early 1900s, an upper middle class family takes in a young African-American woman and her infant son. When the father of the child returns, everything changes.
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Amadeus: Director's Cut Hair Man on the Moon One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest The People vs. Larry Flynt Valmont
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database
What The Critics Said
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...
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Rgatime is a loving, beautifully mounted, graceful film that creates its characters with great clarity.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jay Scott
Ragtime itself twinkles with delight - perhaps only an immigrant, and a recent one, could have made this film, which looks squarely at the social problems gnawing at North America but which finds, within them and without them, cause for hope. [20 Nov 1981]
Variety Staff (Not Credited)
The page-turning joys of E.L. Doctorow's bestselling Ragtime, which dizzily and entertainingly charted a kaleidoscopic vision of a turn-of-century America in the midst of intense social change, have been realized almost completely in Milos Forman's superbly crafted screen adaptation.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Vincent Canby
The movie is sorrowful, funny and beautiful. It is also, finally, very unsatisfactory.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
Forman and Weller have created an impressive but strangely lopsided movie.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Michael Blowen
Except for the evocative sets and Randy Newman's upbeat musical score, Ragtime is better read than seen. [18 Dec 1981]
Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
What's left is a curiously disconnected illustration of American racism, which nevertheless fails to realize the power and irony inherent in its pop-Marxist analysis.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 0.0 (out of 10) based on 0 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
