Remember the Titans

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Works better and cuts deeper than the mostly fictionalized "Hoosiers."

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A civics lesson about integration very artfully - and entertainingly - disguised as an upbeat family sports movie.

Film.com Tom Keogh

A huge surprise: a startlingly resonant yet unabashedly entertaining slice of American history, a popcorn movie with complex observations about, of all things, racism.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Earns its emotional moments, and it takes the audience along.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A conventional, button-pushing but emotionally affecting tale.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Has the outer form of a brave statement about the races in America, but the soul of a sports movie in which everything is settled by the obligatory last play in the last seconds of the championship game.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

It has a good heart, though, and makes an amiable introduction to the integration battles of the '60s and '70s.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Lively and inspirational, with terrific performances from a big star and a host of supporting players.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

It really does communicate an optimistic sense that race is irrelevant and we can all live happily ever after together.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Washington and the others score in this predictable but rousing film where the big victory is over attitudes.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Only a very stony heart could resist its pull.

USA Today Susan Wloszczyna

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, in an atypically high-minded and low-budget frame of mind, manages to breeze through most of the gridiron genre's obstacles with his admirable, crowd-pleasing Titans.

Mr. Showbiz Larry Terenzi

Ultimately nothing more than a live-action cartoon. A high-minded, inspiring cartoon, but a cartoon nonetheless.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

A proudly unsophisticated demonstration of racial progress.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The script's hokiness flattens the performances.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A shrewd, pulpy crowd-pleaser.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

Herman Boone was no doubt a terrific football coach, but the lessons to be drawn from his success in Alexandria are ambiguous, and Remember the Titans is too wrapped up in its weepy macho sentimentality to address them clearly.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Denzel Washington, by now, could do this sort of role in his sleep.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

If Remember the Titans is corny, it's unabashedly, even generously so.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Earnest and well-intentioned.

TNT RoughCut Susannah Breslin

Perfectly effective when judged on its own merits, but is that really enough anymore?

TV Guide Steve Simels

This mix of sweat and uplift in the Civil Rights era doesn't quite come off, despite some strong performances and the fact that it's based on a genuinely inspirational true story.

Chicago Reader Michael Miner

The leads, Denzel Washington and particularly Will Patton, are so good they occasionally make you forget the material is shameless.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Falls short of both the social history lesson it so pointedly strives to impart and the sport it so roughly embraces.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Distressingly shallow.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

History as filtered through the faux-liberal prism of Hollywood's dream factory, and an insult, I believe, to the people who actually carried the fight and endured the pain for civil rights.

Film.com Peter Brunette

Simplistic and non-controversial, and thus is virtually guaranteed commercial success.

LA Weekly Manohla Dargis

Bruckheimer's latest is in some crucial respects worse than those earlier blockbuster bids ("Gone in 60 Seconds" and "Coyote Ugly") -- certainly it's more fraudulent -- because unlike those films, which don't claim to be about anything other than thrills and tits, Remember the Titans means to be about race.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

Its heart is in the right place, but it has no soul.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

A feel-good movie only in the sense that it wants to reassure today's white people about our own enlightenment and how far we've come in the evolution of our attitudes about race.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

So smug and so proud of itself, and you can tell that everybody involved conceives of it as a civics lesson instead of a story, that they squeeze all the life out of it.

Village Voice Dennis Lim

Boorish and flatulent.