Hyde Park on Hudson Reviews
Top CriticSomewhat uneven and ultimately underwhelming, but there's plenty to admire and enjoy here nonetheless.
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| Original Score: 3/5
A languid, tedious effort that never bothers to get to the heart of its characters, the film is a shallow reading of a significant time told mostly from the viewpoint of a lifeless character.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
It's never a bad movie, but it can't quite gel into a good one either.
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| Original Score: C+
Hyde Park on the Hudson' is a forgettable historical footnote.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Essentially, Hyde Park on Hudson is a Shakespearean revel.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Murray's spot-on portrayal of a man juggling myriad pressures and demands, from petty to momentous, marks one of the film's greatest strengths.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
By all rights "Hyde Park on Hudson" should be a slyly funny treat. It is, in places - but it's also strangely flat, as if screenwriter Richard Nelson lost interest somewhere along the way.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Roger Michell's brightly lit film turns America's 32nd president from world statesman into naughty codger, quite the fall from grace for the man who led his country through the Great Depression and the Second World War.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Just think of it as a movie about a friendly, sick old man who can be quite a handful, and put the real FDR out of your mind.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Casting Murray as FDR may feel like a gamble or a stunt at first, but after a few minutes the rightness of the choice is inarguable.
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| Original Score: 3/4
[A] middlebrow, middleweight and middling project ...
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
A deceptively subtle portrayal in which the mostly deadpan comic star disappears beneath the pince-nez and the snappy brim of a presidential fedora, Murray offers a fascinating glimpse into a complex and charismatic figure ...
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
I don't know if I've ever seen a movie as spectacularly tone-deaf as "Hyde Park on Hudson."
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
They're a fun bunch, these Roosevelts and their friends. But even in this crowd, fun's just not enough.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Murray, who has a wider range than we sometimes realize, finds the human core of this FDR and presents it tenderly.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
This is a cool, collected, concise film - to its detriment.
Michell manages to wring the requisite mixture of pathos and mirth from the confab.
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| Original Score: B-
"Hyde Park on Hudson" doesn't dig deep enough into the man, or his women, to be a great film.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Basically a frothy tabloid take on presidential history. And for my money, that's a good thing in a season filled with puffed-up prestige pictures.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Though he has competition, especially from the folks playing the visiting royals, Murray is very much the reason to see "Hyde Park."
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
I wish I could say that Bill Murray's performance as FDR was so wonderful it transcended the material, but the truth is that Murray's character never fully emerges from the fog.
A small film that, for all its considerable charm, miniaturizes its hero in the process of humanizing him.
It's up to Murray to carry the film, which he does with stately calm.
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| Original Score: 3/5
In Hyde Park, actor and character share an evasive cunning beneath the hail-fellow-well-met charm that made Roosevelt such a hit with the press and the public.
A romance that grows out of admiration over a stamp collection is about as boring as it sounds.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Even if this weren't a year when Daniel Day Lewis' turn as Abraham Lincoln was thrilling audiences and critics alike, this performance wouldn't rank among Murray's most memorable work.
'Hyde Park on Hudson' is one of the most bizarrely muddled prestige pictures in recent memory.
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| Original Score: 1/5
Roosevelt was one of the towering figures of the 20th century, but he and his accomplishments scarcely register in this amorphous, bafflingly aimless movie.
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| Original Score: 2/5
I quite enjoyed "Hyde Park on Hudson" while I was watching it, but ultimately it feels like a minor picture on purpose, as if it had been deliberately designed to be everybody's second- or third-choice holiday film.
Instead of focusing on FDR as a president, this movie gives up half its length to tawdry soap opera.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
We can accept that F.D.R. was a charming cad, but if he weren't a great deal more than that there would be no reason to put him at the center of a movie.
Funny, believable, historic and hugely entertaining.
It's dispiriting that a film about the romantic life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who cultivated a small coterie of mistresses, should exhibit so little interest in what engaged its hero ...
Hyde Park could have been fawningly ponderous; that it's merely an airy trifle puts it a cut above the usual Oscar bait.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
An unseemly look at the private life of one of America's most revered commanders-in-chief.
Director Roger Michell's movie is, pretty consistently, dreadful.
It appears that something magical is going to happen. But then it doesn't. It's all setting and no story, all beauty and no humanity ...
A movie in desperate search of a point, despite a good concept and colorful cast.
Full Review
| Original Score: D+
Bill Murray as FDR? It takes a few minutes to get used to, but once he settles into the role of the 32nd president, the idiosyncratic comic actor does a wonderfully jaunty job of it ...
