Into the Wild Reviews
Top Critic
As [Hirsch] struggles with the elements, his increasing frailty and the cinematography's increasing grandeur mesh in a way that's at once iconic and wrenching.
The photography is of the sort you'd find in any half decent nature documentary, with cloying emphasis placed firmly (and sometimes clumsily) on the idea that our neglectful, selfish and not to mention rampantly capitalist ways are destroying the planet.
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| Original Score: 3/6
Hirsch, who carries the film on his increasingly emaciated shoulders, performs heroically, but there's an edge missing.
The movie tries its hardest to celebrate the impetuousness of its hero and the exhilaration of his accomplishments. Mostly, though, it just reminds you of the severity of his mistakes.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Without diminishing the deep transcendentalist yearnings of its young hero, Into the Wild builds to a climax of profound human connectedness, profound human pain.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Into the Wild takes your heart and shakes it, offering inspiration, exasperation and blunt realization in a true story of one young man's dream and nightmare.
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| Original Score: A
It's a beautiful, big, sorrowful film that manages to celebrate America while reexamining what it has stood for and what it has become.
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| Original Score: 4/4
It is we who are made a little more complete for wrestling with, and watching, Penn's film.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a gorgeous, self-assured, thrilling and entertainingly intimate epic, an actor's picture in front of and behind the camera.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Sean Penn's Into the Wild is certainly visual -- it's entirely too visual, to the point of being cheaply lyrical.
Super '70s in both style and sensibility, Into the Wild does for vagabond New Age souls what Deliverance did for misguided suburban macho.
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| Original Score: 3/4
In its expansive spirit of investigation and embrace of life as a creative act, Into the Wild comes as close as any picture ever made to capturing the America that Jack Kerouac discovered half a century ago.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
This is one of those movies I can imagine deciding is a masterpiece in a month's time. And by any measure, "Into the Wild" is a big leap forward for Penn as a director and deserves to be one of the most talked about films of the season.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Sean Penn's spellbinding film adaptation of this book stays close to the source.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Sequences are gorgeously filmed by cinematographer Eric Gautier, and they're heady with the joy of discovery -- they make you want to hit the road into the magnificent landscape we forget is out there.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A road movie with a lofty message that too frequently gets lost in its own thematic barrens. Whereas Krakauer's disturbing book sticks with you, Penn's movie, wrapped in the balloon of its fanciful rhetoric, just floats off.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's [Penn's] warmest, most celebratory and most completely realized film and, though you might not guess it from the material, it is also arguably his most personal.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
As actor and director, Penn long has been drawn to the existential and elemental. Life and death. Remorse and revenge. All these themes converge -- symphonically -- in Into the Wild, his most fully realized work as a director.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
though it's easy to dismiss McCandless' hippified musings and near-suicidal choices as the misguided actions of a kid who read Walden a little too closely in college, Penn's film aims for something more, a deeper telling of a tale of yearning and escape.
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| Original Score: 4/5
A murky screenplay leaves most of the humans ciphers, save for Hal Holbrook in an exquisitely calibrated performance as the avuncular desert retiree whose advice McCandless should have heeded.
If Into the Wild falls short of giving McCandless an indelible cinematic life, the film gets under your skin anyway. It doesn't feel improvised, exactly, but it does feel inhabited.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Sean Penn sings a powerful and poetic hymn to America with "Into the Wild," his sweeping, sensitive and deeply affecting adaptation of Jon Krakauer's best-selling book.
I happen to think Sean Penn is one of our more admirable knotheads -- a fearless actor, a bold controversialist and, as he proved with The Pledge, a very strong director, capable of far subtler moral complexity than Into the Wild affords.
Penn performs one bit of sleight-of-hand on the book that's borderline unforgivable.
This saga was the subject of Into the Wild, a short but fascinating book by Jon Krakauer that, 11 years later, has resulted in a gorgeously photographed and less intermittently fascinating 2 1/2-hour film by Sean Penn.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's a smart script that has a nice respect for books, ideas and the written word.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Captivating and multifaceted. Written and directed by Sean Penn, the film is a haunting and moving experience, highlighted by evocative original music by Eddie Vedder.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
If nature -- if life -- is as wild and precious as the movie makes it out to be, Hirsch needs to give us something, someone, to watch on-screen. We need to feel a presence before we can take the measure of an absence.
There is plenty of sorrow to be found in Into the Wild But though the film's structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but.
| Original Score: 4.5/5
Penn has a real feeling for the stray moments in life that suddenly rush up and overwhelm us with emotion. He also has an eye for beauty in the wilds, of which this film has many. And he's very good with actors.
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| Original Score: B
Into the Wild is a bittersweet odyssey of opportunities lost and paradise found.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Into the Wild represents Penn's most assured and affecting work yet as director and screenwriter, in the wake of The Indian Runner, The Crossing Guard and The Pledge.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Penn's entitled to his reading of McCandless's story, of course, but envisioning it as a Stations of the Cross with a backpack is bizarre and disrespectful.
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| Original Score: 1/6
Into the Wild will haunt anyone willing to take the trip.
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| Original Score: A-
Penn depicts this flawed figure with all the richness and complexity you'd find in the unforgiving Alaskan terrain, presenting McCandless in both his selflessness and selfishness without once judging him or turning him into a martyr.
Into the Wild is all over the place and ultimately, I think, wrongheaded in its attack. But [Director Sean] Penn gives it the good old college try -- or perhaps I should say, the good old society-dropout try.
By the end of the movie, I don't know that I liked Chris, but I understood him and sympathized with him, and sometimes that's more important.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Sean Penn delivers a compelling, ambitious work that will satisfy most admirers of the book.
While the material seems to warrant understated, direct storytelling...Penn opts for epic proportions and clutters his narrative with gimmicks.
