Flight Reviews
Top Critic'Flight' is predictable in its plotting and soft in its conclusions. But thanks to that dynamite opening and Washington's effortless performance, it's also an enjoyable, compelling slice of old-school melodrama.
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| Original Score: 3/5
At a certain point, great actors want to show us the truth of something that may be far from their lives but that somehow they understand, intimately, all too well.
Flight is a well-made motion picture, but not a fun or entertaining one.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Denzel Washington gives one of his most nuanced and impressive performances.
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| Original Score: 4/5
This is Washington's movie from beginning to end, and full of little layers.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
An old-fashioned drama and all the better for it.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A straightforward morality play crossed with a pretty good nail-biter.
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| Original Score: B
This movie is captivating until it gets uplifting - Flight soars when it crashes and crashes when it soars.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's a well-made movie. But after its opening, harrowing action sequence, the film turns into one of the most familiar stories of our time - a downward addiction and denial spiral.
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| Original Score: B-
Zemeckis reins in the story's potential for moralizing and melodrama, instead delivering a refreshingly sophisticated, mature human drama.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's 150 minutes long, goes by in a shot, and for at least 135 minutes, it's a thoroughly engrossing experience.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Flight reminds us of what Washington can do when a role hits him with a challenge that would floor a lesser actor. He's a ball of fire, and his detailed, depth-charged, bruisingly true performance will be talked about for years.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Shameless, though effective, melodrama.
A solid, often engrossing film that doesn't engage us overall the way Denzel Washington's work does.
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| Original Score: 3/5
One of the big reasons Flight is so satisfying is that it moves with the no-frills, meat-and-potatoes conventions of a first-rate procedural while being awash in ambiguity.
The image of the heroic he-man, so entrenched in Hollywood mythology, takes an intriguing detour with Flight.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Washington sells the hollow confidence of a practiced dissembler, and he conjures enough vulnerability and pure charm to make us wince as he circles the drain.
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| Original Score: B+
The film tackles serious issues of addiction, legal intrigue and personal responsibility, with Denzel Washington in top form as a heroic yet morally compromised protagonist.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Just a couple of hours with Washington reclining within the contours of a role until a piece of cardboard becomes a character.
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| Original Score: 3/4
"Flight" performs a daring wing-walk between politically incorrect comedy and gut-wrenching drama, and it succeeds partly thanks to Washington ...
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
There's a lot of talk of "miracles" and "acts of God" in Flight, but it's completely human deeds that make this movie soar.
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| Original Score: 3/4
To watch Mr. Zemeckis working fluidly in consort with Mr. Washington's ferocious performance is to regret this director's last, technologically determined decade.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Denzel Washington has fought like hell against the Sidney Poitier syndrome; for every movie in which he's played Mr. Noble, there are more in which he's played a heel.
But while a movie as grim as Flight could use a moment or two of levity, does it have to be in service to the antithetical idea that drug dealers are awesome?
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Flight" is Washington's show, and he's marvelous in it. But Zemeckis and his team put everything in place so that Washington could run with it, with unnervingly good results.
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| Original Score: 4/4
In Robert Zemeckis' "Flight," we watch a master actor play a character who's always acting.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Not often does a movie character make such a harrowing personal journey that keeps us in deep sympathy all of the way.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Slowly but surely, "Flight" degenerates from a tale of moral paradox and wounded romance into a mid-1990s after-school special about addiction and recovery.
"Flight" is neither a simple story of heroism, nor one of a fallen hero. Things are more complex than that -- and it is its complexities that make the film all the more rewarding an experience.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
For the most part, "Flight" manages to achieve the tricky balance of functioning as a serious, adult drama that's also crowd-pleasing.
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| Original Score: 3/4
AA, God, and prayer are invoked by various characters with various religious convictions in John Gatins' unflinching screenplay, each time with a seriousness, modesty, and ease rare in so many movies about drunks and their journeys.
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| Original Score: A
It is probably more than a little reductive to say that this movie is The Lost Weekend with highly superior special effects. But there's something to that, honestly.
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| Original Score: 4/5
There's something in almost all of Denzel Washington's performances, a calm in the midst of a storm, that separates him from the rank and file, that elevates him to a status among the truly gifted actors of any generation.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Flight doesn't quite soar past its narrative limitations. There's plenty of virtuosity to go around here-just precious little transcendence.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Mr. Zemeckis has forgotten nothing about how to stage the kind of breathtaking live-action fireworks display that keeps an audience paralyzed.
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| Original Score: 3/4
No actor is as brilliant, or as cunning, as Denzel Washington at portraying superhuman coolness and the scary prospect of its loss.
Washington's nuanced performance is a tightrope walk between the Denzel whom people expect and the character he's boldly burrowed into.
A film of individually fine scenes that at best add up to a good, but not a great, movie.
Like Cast Away, Flight's narrative is set in motion by a wreck, a foundering, but this time there's a sort of genius behind the wheel.
Audiences buckle up for one kind of movie but end up strapped in for another in Flight, director Robert Zemeckis' welcome return to live-action after a dozen years away.
This absorbing drama provides Denzel Washington with one of his meatiest, most complex roles, and he flies with it.
