Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope Reviews
What places it a sizable cut about the routine is its spectacular visual effects, the best since Stanley Kubrick's 2001.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the double sunset.
George Lucas, who made American Graffiti, has put together a sci-fi film that draws on any number of associations. Star Wars is both amazing and familiar.
TIME Magazine
Top CriticA grand and glorious film that may well be the smash hit of 1977, and certainly is the best movie of the year so far.
A magnificent film. George Lucas set out to make the biggest possible adventure fantasy out of his memories of serials and older action epics, and he succeeded brilliantly.
Has distinct limitations, but the current return to a cinema of spectacle and wonder is wholly encouraging.
It is, all in all, hard to think of a place or an age group that would not respond to the enthusiastic inventiveness with which Lucas has enshrined his early loves.
Compelling backstory, exciting action and pleasantly archetypal characters.
A dynamic entertainment, efficiently and exuberantly setting up its mythic tale of heroes and villains, rebels and rogues, princesses and monsters, good and evil.
A combination of past and future, Western and space odyssey, myth and dream world, Star Wars may be the most enduring piece of escapism ever put on film.
Like some indefatigable King of the Hill, it stands alone and triumphant, regardless of the many imitators that assail its position.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Twenty years later, George Lucas' loved saga of the war between good and evil in a distant galaxy returns in digitally enhanced and augmented form.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
His work here seems less inventive than in THX 1138.
Darth Vader and his James Earl Jones voice is a bad egg no matter how much we know about his screwy upbringing.
Backgrounds in some sequences are now more populated than they were, and it's fun to see all the creatures that make up the "wretched hive of scum and villainy" that Alec Guinness' Obi-Wan Kenobi describes.
None of these characters has any depth, and they're all treated like the fanciful props and settings!
George Lucas has made the kind of sci-fi adventure movie you dream about finding!
