A Beautiful Mind Reviews
Top CriticIt isn't the device that's so crude, but the execution, which turns Nash's persecutory demons into nuisances that won't leave us alone.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Darned if Howard doesn't make [Nash] as neat and warm as a tea cozy.
Combustible Celluloid
This is a precision story as told by filmmakers who are shooting at the side of a barn with water balloons filled with syrup.
Flick Filosopher
The script gets us so inside Nash's head that it makes us a party to his illness and the paranoia that it spawns... but Howard doesn't know how to show us this without, ultimately, making us feel cheated and jerked around.
Matinee Magazine
Howard softens the hard edge of real schizophrenia with movie gloss as cotton candy, shaping the troubled history of mathematical genius John Forbes Nash, Jr. into feel good escapism.
Full Review
| Original Score: D
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
Ron Howard trashes the true story of the mentally troubled Nobel Prize-winning mathematician genius John Forbes Nash Jr. ...
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
MovieMartyr.com
Pedantic and sophistic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
ReelTalk Movie Reviews
As John Nash, Russell Crowe projects the 'warts-and-all' persona of a genius trying to conquer mental illness. But I can't help reacting negatively to most biopics. I never know what's real and what's made-up -- kinda like Nash himself.
One of those formulaically rendered Important Subject movies.
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Since love conquers all, you know everything will turn out okay. It's practically a mathematical formula.
Tells us little about paranoid schizophrenia, less about genius, and next to nothing about Nash.
You can practically feel director Ron Howard standing over your tear ducts, straining to extract every last salty drop.
Old School Reviews
Howard's sappy movie covers some of the material, but is far more concerned with box office and Oscar glory.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
Looking Closer
It presents itself as a biography of the flesh-and-blood John Nash. And in fact, it is really only a flashy, sentimental Hollywood movie, inspired by a few particular details of the John Nash story.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Cinema Sight
A pedestrian film with a rudimentary script that forces the actors to create believability where there might otherwise be none.
| Original Score: 2/4
FilmStew.com
A tedious exercise in manipulation that once again proves Hollywood is short of vision.
Film Blather
Neither aesthetically pleasing ... nor intelligent.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Slant Magazine
A Beautiful Mind is like a brick to the head to anyone who ever winced at the utterance of "infinity plus one."
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
DustinPutman.com
A frequently disappointing cut-and-paste job...it fails to find any sort of smooth rhythm or dramatic arc.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
L.A. Weekly
It's sad to see a beautiful mind whittled down by such a plain one.
