The Help Reviews
Sky Movies
A guaranteed tear-jerker that serves as a decent reminder of America's very own Apartheid, it's fine as a slice of history. As a story though, it's sadly underwhelming.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
FILMINK (Australia)
It's a heartfelt effort and soundly performed, but it doesn't have the depth or nuance to sustain its long running time.
Top CriticAs in many reductive period pieces, there are no real characters here, just archetypes, namely reactionary cretins and sensitive souls who anticipate modern attitudes.
Thompson on Hollywood
Mainstream crowd pleaser The Help is a well-cast tearjerker set in a fake 60s Mississippi. Viola Davis, Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer give Oscar-worthy performances.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Seven Days
It's camp for people who want to feel like they're seeing something educational and uplifting between the guffaws.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
While my neighbor had used up her hankie supply by the end of the movie, I left dry-eyed and disappointed.
"The Help" takes us on a pop-cultural tour that savors the picturesque, and strengthens stereotypes it purports to shatter.
Slant Magazine
High school creative-writing-class ironies of all kinds abound in The Help.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
BET.com
Davis is the Aretha Franklin of acting, but this is another clichéd civil rights film. There is a dash of 'The Long Walk Home' and a strong helping of 'Driving Miss Daisy.' 'The Help' wasn't impactful enough to be offensive.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
There are small moments in the film though that make you long for a movie that is not so deep-dish serious and self-conscious.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Some adaptations find a fresh, cinematic way to convey a book's spirit but "The Help" doesn't.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
We get a fairly typical Hollywood flattening of history, with powerful villains and disenfranchised heroes.
Screen International
The Help is a nicely cast but otherwise pedestrian adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's best-selling 2009 novel.
At the Movies (Australia)
It irks me when a film deals with issues that are actually important in an unsubtle and sentimenalised way.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Save for Ms. Davis's, the performances are almost all overly broad, sometimes excruciatingly so, characterized by loud laughs, bugging eyes and pumping limbs.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
BrianOrndorf.com
It's not a particularly original story and not sold with much integrity. A few wonderful performances aside, The Help is a maddeningly distracted film, occasionally flirting with utter irresponsibility.
Full Review
| Original Score: D+
NewsBlaze
A 'she said, she said' array of gossipy catfights targeting snobby southern belles. But that lets the men off the hook, while locating the scourge of Jim Crow segregation almost entirely among these demonized upper crust desperate housewives womenfolk.
Antagony & Ecstasy
A chore to sit through. At 146 minutes long, there is absolutely no excusing the running time... a panoply of lazy bromides.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
Aims for "To Kill a Mockingbird" significance, but lands in "Steel Magnolias" territory.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Projection Booth
As regressive as it is well meaning.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
