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To Kill a Mockingbird

Universal Pictures | Release Date: December 25, 1962

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

88	METASCORE Universal acclaim based on 16 Critics

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

100

Michael Wilmington

Few films have caught the special feel and rhythms of childhood so well, with such uncondescending warmth and humor. And few bring out more powerfully the themes of anti-racism and the virtues and joys of community and family. [20 Apr 2007, p.C5]

100

James Powers

To Kill A Mockingbird is a product of American realism, and it is a rare and worthy treasure. Read full review

100

William Thomas

Storytelling doesn't get much better than this. Read full review

100

Larry Tubelle

To Kill a Mockingbird is a major film achievement, a significant, captivating and memorable picture that ranks with the best of recent years. Read full review

100

Marc Lee

As Mulligan so deftly demonstrates, the story is in the characters, their failings and fragility, their heroism and nobility of spirit. It's in the depiction of heart-breaking cruelty and heart-warming humanity. It's in the innocence of a child's world overshadowed by the evil that adults do. Read full review

100

Staff (Not Credited)

One of the year's most fetching and affecting pictures. Read full review

100

James Berardinelli

To Kill a Mockingbird is a faithful adaptation of one of the 20th century's most important American works of literature. It is also a masterpiece in its own right. This is one of those rare productions where everything is in place - a superior script, a perfect cast, and a director who has a clear vision and achieves what he sets out to do. Read full review

100

Marjory Adams

There is not only artistry in the development of the story - there is beauty, sympathy and emotional appeal in almost every scene. Read full review

100

Todd Gilchrist

The film never slips into cheap melodrama, and ultimately offers a remarkable portrait of humanity at its best and worst, not to mention an ideal to which all people should aspire. Read full review

Bosley Crowther

Their charming enactments of a father and his children in that close relationship that can occur at only one brief period are worth all the footage of the film. Read full review

Dave Kehr

Peck's icy remove works for once—as a kid's idea of a parent, he's frighteningly effective. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

A hauntingly nostalgic portrayal of childhood mischief set in a racially divided Alabama town in the 1930s. If the film's tone sometimes seems overly righteous, it's offset by a poetic lyricism that is difficult to resist embracing. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

The film sits somewhere between the bogus virtue of Kramer's The Defiant Ones and the poetry of Laughton's Night of the Hunter, combining racial intolerance with the nightmares of childhood, born out of Kennedy's stand on civil rights and Martin Luther King's marching. Read full review

Roger Ebert

To Kill a Mockingbird, set in Maycomb, Alabama, in 1932, uses the realities of its time only as a backdrop for the portrait of a brave white liberal. Read full review

Lee Cassanell

To Kill a Mockingbird is by no means as irreproachable as our memories would lead us to believe but it’s still a gripping yarn and well worth revisiting. Read full review

Pauline Kael

The movie is part eerie Southern gothic and part Hollywood self-congratulation for its enlightened racial attitudes.