Average Rating: 7/10
Reviews Counted: 197
Fresh: 150 | Rotten: 47
Though arguably guilty of glossing over its racial themes, The Help rises on the strength of its cast -- particularly Viola Davis, whose performance is powerful enough to carry the film on its own.
Average Rating: 7.2/10
Critic Reviews: 40
Fresh: 27 | Rotten: 13
Though arguably guilty of glossing over its racial themes, The Help rises on the strength of its cast -- particularly Viola Davis, whose performance is powerful enough to carry the film on its own.
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Average Rating: 4.2/5
User Ratings: 65,287
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The Help stars Emma Stone as Skeeter, Viola Davis as Aibileen and Octavia Spencer as Minny-three very different, extraordinary women in Mississippi during the 1960s, who build an unlikely friendship around a secret writing project that breaks societal rules and puts them all at risk. From their improbable alliance a remarkable sisterhood emerges, instilling all of them with the courage to transcend the lines that define them, and the realization that sometimes those lines are made to be
Aug 10, 2011 Wide
Dec 6, 2011
$169.7M
DreamWorks Studios
All Critics (197) | Top Critics (40) | Fresh (153) | Rotten (47) | DVD (8)
"The Help" takes us on a pop-cultural tour that savors the picturesque, and strengthens stereotypes it purports to shatter.
Thanks to a talented cast -- starting with leads Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer -- the movie is often entertaining. But The Help should have been challenging too.
As in many reductive period pieces, there are no real characters here, just archetypes, namely reactionary cretins and sensitive souls who anticipate modern attitudes.
The Help is a high-functioning tearjerker, but the catharsis it offers feels glib and insufficient, a Barbie Band-Aid on the still-raw wound of race relations in America.
[The Help] is, in some ways, crude and obvious, but it opens up a broad new swath of experience on the screen, and parts of it are so moving and well acted that any objections to what's second-rate seem to matter less as the movie goes on.
Appalling, entertaining, touching and perhaps even a bit healing, The Help is an old-fashioned grand yarn of a film, the sort we rarely get these days.
Octavia Spencer's Minny provides the movie's funniest moments, especially when she gets her own back on former employer Hilly with an audacious reprisal that proves that revenge is indeed a dish best served cold.
La película realmente triunfa en la exploración de la complicidad y solidaridad que se establece entre mujeres solas, quebradas, necesitadas de oportunidades e inconformes con los moldes sociales preestablecidos.
I found it surprisingly enjoyable. And I suppose that's the greatest compliment I could give the film: I didn't hate it, even if I was dreading it going in.
A quiet but powerful film that really does have Oscar written all over it.
Aimed at heart and conscience, novel and film have their overdone moments but remain worthy of close attention.
Brimming with believable, likeable women characters and set against the turbulence of Mississippi in the 1960s, 'The Help' is almost as good as Kathryn Stockett's novel.
how the novel came to be published against all odds, the film to be made with Taylor as director, once known become integral to the film experience. Perfectly written, acted, directed, and produced, it's as moving on its fiftieth viewing as on its first.
"The Help" is refreshing and possibly the best film of the year.
Disney ably delivers a machine-tooled Blu-ray presentation of The Help, a delicious confection about the Southern matriarchy, set against the burgeoning civil rights movement, with a secret ingredient: shit.
To "the help," the possibility of the children growing up as clones of their parents isn't a consideration. It's all about loving the innocent. But, it's a dilemma.
This is a generally family-friendly affair which isn't interested in getting its hands too dirty.
Some will scoff that it covers familiar territory or that the message should have been angrier and louder...but there is beauty in its lack of heavy handed sermonizing.
As hard to dislike as it is to truly admire, this artfully manipulative issue movie knows where its strengths lie... and most of them lie in Viola Davis.
A faithful, heart-warming adaptation that will satisfy fans of the book, divert the uninitiated and tickle the Academy's fancy.
The movie is facile, not a little patronising, and it ends up as crude and sentimental.
This coming of age tale is deeply affecting, magnificently acted and truly enlightening ... are truly inspirational women who are an absolute joy to spend time with.
I was disappointed at the end to realize the picture was fiction not fact but perhaps that's a tribute to the authenticity writer-director Tate Taylor achieves in this beautifully realized picture.
The running time of 146 minutes takes too much wind out of Aibileen's sails, but her tear-jerking dignity in the denouement is marvellous to behold.
I absolutely loved this movie, i thought it was a really emotional, at times heart breaking, it was funny and exceptionally acted! This movie is brilliant throughout although maybe a little slow theres enough humour to keep you interested!Its a powerful story about a white woman clearly influenced by her own
May 5, 2012
Super Reviewer
I really had my doubts about this movie, fearing that it would be another typical "white messiah helps African Americans in need" film. And, while there are some elements of that in here, thankfully, the film shows that the whites need help from the blacks, too, so it's not a one sided affair.Set in the early 1960s in
November 3, 2010Super Reviewer
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