Erin Brockovich Reviews
It's easy to forget you're watching a performance.
Before long, the character simply becomes irritating.
Entertaining, instructive, emotional, expertly directed and funny.
It's a prime Julia Roberts movie, and it is beguiling at just that.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The film lacks focus and energy, the character development is facile and thin, and what about those necklines?
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| Original Score: 2/4
Even if Erin Brockovich leaves us contemplating its many loopholes, the verdict remains: some sellouts are worth the price of admission.
One of the gutsiest, most exciting, and most satisfying courtroom docudramas ever, one that genuinely lifts the spirits as you watch it.
It's a victory for Julia Roberts, co-star Albert Finney and director Steven Soderbergh. It's also a victory for the audience.
Roberts has never been better as she glares and swears her way through the movie.
Roberts does what the best movie stars do. She makes you believe in Erin Brockovich as a living, breathing human being even as you're also constantly aware that you're watching Julia Roberts on screen.
It's not that this is lousy entertainment, it's just that it's a Serious Topic given unnecessary Celebrity Sheen.
Just watch [Finney's] reactions to see a great supporting actor at work.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Soderbergh demands a lot from his star here, and she delivers, perhaps more than even he expected.
[Soderbergh's] knack for getting career-defining turns from actors is intact.
[Roberts looks] spectacularly and movingly human even at the expense of her established persona.
With Erin Brockovich, [Soderbergh] pulls off his most impressive feat yet: giving crowd-pleasing baubles a good name.
A completly involving movie that will grab you from the first frame of film to the closing credits.
The best "message movie" in recent memory, it is also, so far, the best film of the new millennium.
The arc of the tale may be conventional, but Roberts, in her most forceful dramatic performance, allows us to take in every moment through fresh, impassioned eyes.
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| Original Score: B+
What Soderbergh can do as well as anyone is bring restraint, intelligence and subtlety to mainstream material, and what a difference that makes.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
USA Today
Top CriticAtop all the talk about this being Roberts' career performance so far (and it is), it would be unjust to overlook that this is also the best screen role Finney has had in years.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
With this script, Grant becomes Hollywood's foremost writer of strong, smart women's roles, and Lachmann works the same wonders with the atomizing light of Southern California that he did in Soderbergh's The Limey.
From the opening to the perfect final shot, Roberts is in nearly every scene of Erin Brockovich, and there isn't a second when we're not on her side.
Not only is every plot development signaled far in advance, but nearly every scene in the film's long second section rings a variation of one of two themes: 1) Julia Roberts tells somebody off, or 2) Julia Roberts feels somebody's pain.
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| Original Score: 3/5
