Promised Land Reviews
Top CriticThis is a solid if at times too conventional tale of a classic moral conflict.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
[It's mostly] a well-wrought drama that feels genuine as it goes about spinning a tale worthy of our challenging times.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Promised Land is more effective as an anti-fracking screed than as a drama.
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| Original Score: B-
Damon and McDormand are terrific as co-workers seeking the same goal, though they see their work from different points of view.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This isn't a movie about easy fixes, be they personal or political; it's a film about long-term problems.
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| Original Score: B
Far too awkward and contrived a drama to change many hearts and minds.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The 50/50 split between profiteers and tree-huggers might reflect the nation as a whole, but it makes for diluted drama.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Damon's performance as corporate salesman Steve Butler is one of his best.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A well-intentioned look at a fraught issue, but the Damon-Krasinski screenplay ultimately opts for Hollywood oversimplification.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
A love triangle involving the two men and a local schoolteacher (Rosemarie DeWitt) seems more like a commercial necessity than an integral part of the story, and the small-town types are indifferently realized by director Gus Van Sant.
Damon and Krasinski co-wrote the script, and they do a nice job of giving the usual confrontations a gentle and surprising spin.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
One of several ways this ... picture falls short is in trying to sell a personal-salvation story as a salve to the conundrum it presents.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
"Promised Land" offers an experience that's alternately amusing and frustrating, full of impassioned earnestness as well as saggy sections.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It's as if the people behind Promised Land only agreed to make the movie if there was an unambiguous "policy statement" at the end, and that's what we're subjected to.
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| Original Score: 2/4
"Promised Land" is a fine place to start appreciating Matt Damon, who always makes it seem as if everybody else is acting and he's just going through the movie being natural.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Matt Damon's new film "Promised Land" starts off on the right foot - and then shoots itself in it.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Damon wants to put you in Very Serious mode and have you think of "issue movies" like "The China Syndrome," but all I could do was laugh and think of "Lolita."
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Despite their Everyman appeal, Damon and Krasinski don't create much by way of emotional investment, instead becoming mirror images of their most mild-mannered, white-bread selves.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Though the film eventually caves to sentiment and stereotype, its alert performances and muted rhythms offer much to enjoy in the interim.
While there's no faulting the talent or good intentions of the people involved, however, they make the mistake of leaving out the spoonful of sugar, which makes the medicine get stuck in your throat. It's all message and very little movie.
Promised Land is a hard-sell movie because it doesn't have the confidence in its audience to make any other outcome seem personally viable, to give the opposition a fighting chance or persuasive voice.
When you add in the plot contrivances that cluster around its finale, "Promised Land" concludes as an echo of a convincing film rather than the real deal.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
While there's little doubt about where "Promised Land" is going (you don't think a Gus Van Sant movie is going to side with a corporation, do you?), it's a pleasure to watch it go there.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Promised Land is a frustrating film to watch. It should be better than this, smarter than this.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It's a fine line between interesting characters and "Northern Exposure" quirk, but the movie mostly stays on the right side of it.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Promised Land" feels divided against itself, not quite sure how to reconcile its polemical intentions with its storytelling impulses, and thus finally unable to fulfill its own promise.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
The script is unconvincing; two key narrative twists, one related to the other, are deeply hokey.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The kind of earnest, oversimplified big-issues drama that Hollywood loves to foist on audiences as seasonal proof of its serious-mindedness.
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| Original Score: 2/5
There's a lightness of touch here that makes its level-headed advocacy go down smooth as lager, and allows some quiet room for thought.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Promised Land is a potent and powerful look at how the stressed economy is stressing farm communities across America. Director Gus Van Sant finds the human side of a knotty issue.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The movie slogs along like a Grant Wood farmer behind his plow.
Whatever ambiguity the movie's core lacks is rebalanced at the surface; its organic textures are woven on a conspicuously synthetic frame.
...This is no vanity project, but a real, solid and legitimate piece of filmmaking.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
A quietly absorbing if finally somewhat dubious drama about an unlikely anti-corporate crusader.
Promised Land presents its environmental concerns in a clear, upfront manner but hits some narrative and character bumps in the second half that weaken the impact of this fundamentally gentle, sympathetic work.
