Average Rating: 7.2/10
Reviews Counted: 168
Fresh: 136 | Rotten: 32
An acute survey of the football-obsessed heartland that succeeds as both a stirring drama and a rousing sports movie.
Average Rating: 7.5/10
Critic Reviews: 39
Fresh: 34 | Rotten: 5
An acute survey of the football-obsessed heartland that succeeds as both a stirring drama and a rousing sports movie.
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Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 166,725
H.G. Bissinger's best-selling true-life account of a few months in the life of a high-school football team comes to the screen in this adaptation written and directed by Peter Berg. Odessa, TX, is an oil town in the western part of the state that's home to the Permian High School Panthers, the football team with the best winning record in the state. Odessa is a town with more than its share of problems; the decline of the oil business in Texas has set the city's economy into a tailspin, and
Oct 8, 2004 Wide
Jan 18, 2005
$61.2M
Universal Pictures
All Critics (173) | Top Critics (40) | Fresh (141) | Rotten (32) | DVD (37)
Few films have shown so powerfully the slashing double edge of sports fever.
A heart-pounding big-screen treatment that captures all the action of a tumultuous season while showing the emotional toll on the players.
Nuance typifies both Mr. Thornton's highly calibrated performance and the film's absence of unnecessary underlining.
Substitutes slick, cynical point-scoring for insight.
Friday Night Lights is the real deal, a grim, in-your-face expose of one West Texas school's fanatical sports program.
The story gestures at a cross-sectional view of America on a Nashville scale.
So much more than a football movie.
What Friday Night Lights offers is the perspective that, for the people and young players caught up in this whirlwind, football simultaneously means everything and ultimately nothing.
Friday Night Lights is a feel-good movie, but it's not real. It's a hard-hitting Hallmark greeting card. It's no wonder it appealed to Larry King %u2014 it's safe, easy, conventional, and feigns incisiveness.
Had Billy Bob Thornton not been so good in so many films, people would be talking about this as his greatest role.
The script spends at least as much time exploring the psychologies of the young players and the problems they face at home as it does rallying the audience behind their efforts on the field.
While the atmosphere is excellent, and the general elements all strong, the film sadly fails to give any real insight or depth in regards to explaining the hows and whys of the near fever over the game and its players.
You'll leave the theater somewhat emotionally spent -- feeling like you've been tackled by a 220-pound linebacker -- but it's worth the ride. One of the best sports movies ever.
The affecting, gruelling result is less a document of recreational sport than one of obligation and ordeal.
The movie's principles are seriously out of whack, even as it angles toward a Big Life Lesson about learning to live with falling short of greatness.
The best sports movie for years, as it's not about sport at all. Forget fears of jingoistic grandstanding, this is an un-American all-American tale that deserves attention.
An excellent effort that packs a solid, emotional punch.
A movie is rare when they make a movie as good as Friday Night Lights, and a movie that is the best performance from Billy Bob Thorton ever. The plot is the best sports plot ive seen since Rudy or Hoosiers. The characters were all great, they all gave a backround of themselves by their expression, really good acting.
April 12, 2011
Super Reviewer
Mike Winchell: This is for the state championship. I love all of ya'll, baby. I love all of ya'll. "Hope Comes Alive on Friday Night"As far as football movies or sports movies in general go, Friday Night Lights sets itself apart from most. I don't know if I've seen another movie that captures the emotion of high school
June 20, 2011
Super Reviewer
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