Finding Forrester 2000

Ebert & Roeper: Read more

Susan Stark, Detroit News: Read more

Philip Wuntch, Dallas Morning News: Warm and likable -- and, during the holidays, warm and likable is often what moviegoers want. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: A transparent attempt by director Gus Van Sant to repeat the Oscar success of his earlier Good Will Hunting. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: If director Gus Van Sant had always been a hack it wouldn't matter so much, but personally I find this form of licking the audience's cheeks like an obsequious puppy deeply offensive. Read more

Steve Murray, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: A well-acted, if overly familiar, tale of an unlikely friendship. Read more

Eric Harrison, Houston Chronicle: It might've worked better if the film had tried harder to turn these characters into living, breathing people, instead of the bickering odd couple that's become such a stereotype. Read more

Paul Clinton (CNN.com), CNN.com: A rare find. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: When the movie conveys the light in a student's eyes, and those of his teacher, at the moment when knowledge has been shared, it's a story that can never be told often enough. Read more

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: An anti-intellectual film about the intellectual life. Read more

John Anderson, Newsday: The movie eventually turns ridiculous, as you thought it might. Read more

Stephen Holden, New York Times: Finding Forrester is 100 percent bogus, from its high-concept characters whose resemblance to real human beings is distant at best, to the 'lessons' it imparts on everything from courtship to writing. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: Its unhurried exploration of the interaction between the two leads is worth spending a couple hours in a movie theater. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: Movies about writers are notoriously hard to do, since writing by its nature is not cinematic. Finding Forrester evades that problem by giving us a man who wrote one good novel a long time ago, and now writes no more. Read more

Laura Miller, Salon.com: A conventional stew of overblown, bogus emotion and rigged catharsis. Read more

Wesley Morris, San Francisco Chronicle: Sure, maybe Gus has gone Hollywood, but at least he's gone there sideways -- fully aware that a soul is a terrible thing to waste. Read more

Time Out: The leaden screenplay can be fingered for many of the film's faults. But what happened to the off-kilter film-maker last seen at work in To Die For? Read more

Emanuel Levy, Variety: The movie may be too middlebrow and conventional for Gus Van Sant's or Sean Connery's fans, but it's well acted. Read more

Michael Atkinson, Village Voice: At times you can feel Van Sant trying to loosen the movie's windpipe-folding collar, but he doesn't get far, except with Busta Rhymes, as Jamal's gone-nowhere big brother, whose moments are so full of bounce and warmth they feel like invasions from the sc Read more

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post: Finding Forrester manages to take the cerebral act of literary creation and make it exciting, sexy even. Read more