Ray Reviews
Top CriticSluggish, conventional, and almost completely lacking in energy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
FilmStew.com
Foxx, like Will Smith in Ali, has perfected a party trick rather than a performance. Give him some sunglasses, let him rock back and forth, and he does a great Ray Charles.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Arizona Daily Star
A movie with half the 150-minute running time could have done just as much unchaining.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
EDGE Boston
"Ray" starts out well... and then falls into the entrenched paths of just about every other overwrought, over-long musical biopic ever filmed.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Slant Magazine
Foxx's mannered performance fails to convey the complexities beneath Charles's trademark twitches.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
FilmsInReview.com
A beloved artist unwinds with a parade of women and the needle.
Long Island Press
Potent and vibrant as far as the music goes, but reticent, self-conscious and pretty much stuck on unexplored surfaces when it comes to this creative giant's complex life and times.
Nick's Flick Picks
At all moments, Ray is a blend of the workmanlike with the unresolved, the piquant and the tendentious, the stuff that do right and the stuff that do wrong.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Blunt Review
Jamie Foxx is positively Times-Square electric, the film however is more like a flickering energy-efficient 40 watt-bulb.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
SPLICEDWire
A great performance does not make a biopic great...a biopic needs to be like Ray Charles - departing from formula and daring to be different.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Aufmuth.com
Maybe it's the hype but I'm not feeling the love.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
eFilmCritic.com
Couldn't we just watch a Behind-the-Music and get the same greatest hits package in 100-less minutes than another dry, maybe-worthy-for- movie-of-the-week- status, biopic?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
culturevulture.net
When [the music isn't playing], the film seems conventional, unimaginative and stretched out well beyond its ability to sustain narrative momentum.
ReelTalk Movie Reviews
Suffers from over-emphasis on personal demons, too many flashbacks and a tacked-on ending -- but Jamie Foxx is incredible.
Spirituality and Practice
Ray boasts a great smorgasbord of music and a fine performance by Jamie Foxx but is hobbled by a mediocre screenplay and its long playing time.
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5
Cinema em Cena
A busca por concisão em uma cinebiografia é importante, mas não pode ser alcançada sacrificando-se a complexidade da história e tornando-a artificial, que é o que ocorre aqui.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Ray is so reflexive that it often seems to be about the procedural mechanics of biopics.
It's a shame about Ray, because Foxx is trapped in a movie that takes the music icon's unique story and turns it into cheesy, sentimental American Dream cliches.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Foxx is not at fault here -- with Ray, he arrives at the front ranks of American film actors -- but the filmmakers' need to bend biography until it assumes triumphal shape is.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's the kind of movie in which every song or musical breakthrough has a dramatic inspiration drawn from a real-life experience, designed to make us believe a life can be analyzed through its creative expressions and successes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
