Lee Daniels' The Butler Reviews
Top CriticA high-minded, didactic, but irresistible entertainment ...
Forest Whitaker imbues his part with immense dignity and the old-age makeup is effective showcasing Cecil during his later years.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Winfrey is good, though, demonstrating yet again that she's an actress and not just a celebrity playing an actress.
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| Original Score: B-
A history lesson in violence and endurance. A sentimental journey. A tribute. Director Daniels and the dedicated cast of The Butler deliver all that.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The Butler may be a sanctimonious cartoon, but it points to events in the civil rights struggle that were as grotesque and extraordinary as any fiction can invent.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"The Butler" mixes big issues and big people and real human life with surprising grace.
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| Original Score: B+
It's too obviously a careful tour through American history, and while some sequences work - particularly the various attacks on civil-rights workers - too much of it feels as flat and cheap as a film strip.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Forest Whitaker gives the performance of his career.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The director's sometimes absurd bravado-along with Forest Whitaker's grave, wise performance in the title role-is what gives this outsized and sometimes lumbering film its irrefutable emotional power.
"Lee Daniels' The Butler" might have been titled "Lee Daniels' Forrest Gump" - its hero challenged morally rather than mentally, but watching history in Gumpian fashion, as a series of cameos viewed through a slightly clueless daze.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The movie's a mess, but a unique and provocative one.
"The Butler" is a nice idea for a movie, but has a mostly silly script and some of the craziest and most laughable casting imaginable.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Remarkable not for its "Forrest Gump"-itude but for its unerring social portrait of a black middle class torn by the stress-fractures of an era.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Even at its worst, it prefers to stimulate rather than launch another noisy parade of stereotypes.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Packed with stunt casting and distracting performances.
The Butler is an inspiring and important summation of the black struggle.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This is one significant film where less would have been a whole lot more.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Fiction merges with fact, and finally soars.
When compared to something as patronizing and manipulative as "Forrest Gump," "Lee Daniels' The Butler" comes off as an earnest crowd-pleaser with history on its side.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
There's no denying the stumbles that mar this alternately riveting and risible historical epic. Yet Lee Daniels' The Butler holds you, provokes you and ultimately moves you.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"The Butler" has all the ingredients to conduct a "for your consideration" campaign come Oscar time - it's noble, poignant, historically important.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Strong work from the three stars as a family splintered by Civil Rights-era tensions, but the film too often resorts to easy sentiment and simple caricatures.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The forced mash-up of "Forrest Gump" and "The Remains of the Day" leaves a bit too much machine oil on the shag carpet, but Whitaker is there to clean it up.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A brilliantly truthful film on a subject that is usually shrouded in wishful thinking, mythmongering and outright denial.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Like America itself, the movie's a stimulating tangle.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Make no mistake, Daniels is gunning for awards here; the movie has that sheen, that Big Important Feel. But the performances keep it grounded.
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| Original Score: 4/5
"Lee Daniels' The Butler" is big, brave, crude and contradictory, very bad in places and very good in others, and every American should see it.
Full of truth that's ultimately diluted by a lack of focus.
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| Original Score: 6.4/10
The film covers a lot of ground with many players, sometimes risking collapse, but it never lets us forget the quest for wholeness at the heart of the story.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Sometimes it's too didactic or sentimental. But unlike Daniels's previous pictures, Precious and The Paperboy, it doesn't pretend to audacious storytelling.
Daniels and company may not have made a masterpiece, but they have made a film you should see.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Even with all contrivances and obvious point-making and familiar historical signposting, Daniels' The Butler is always engaging, often entertaining and certainly never dull.
You can object to the thuggish direction and the script that's a series of signposts, but not the central idea, which is genuinely illuminating.
A star-filled, if heavy-handed, labor of love that certainly has its heart in the right place, and scores dramatically often enough to recommend it.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Look beyond the film's dewy-eyed, seemingly Wikipedia-sourced trappings and you'll see Daniels hasn't gone Oscar-bait-crazy.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Whitaker digs in deep and gives a marvelous under-the-skin performance; he seems to catch the very essence of a man who has spent his whole life trying not to be seen.
It's too bad Daniels seemingly felt compelled to fish for tears, because The Butler has no shortage of powerful scenes and memorable performances.
An ambitious, sweeping period drama that manages to be incredibly affecting and feel as if the words ''For Your Consideration'' are stamped across every frame.
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| Original Score: B+
