The King's Speech Reviews
Top CriticA powerful back story does not necessarily improve a movie, but The King's Speech has a pretty irresistible one. It might even end with a dramatic night at the Oscars in February.
In The King's Speech, Colin Firth once again reminds us of what a great actor he is.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Classic, rousing entertainment loaded with both humor and poignancy.
The King's Speech is the rare work of art that's also an immense crowdpleaser.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The King's Speech is simultaneously cozy and majestic.
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| Original Score: B+
It is an intelligent, winning drama fit for a king -- and the rest of us. And this year, there were far too few of those coming from Hollywood.
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| Original Score: 4/4
OK, sure, "The King's Speech" obviously is feel-good Oscar bait, but who cares? It's also a terrific movie with two fantastic performances at its heart.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
"The King's Speech" is old-fashioned filmmaking at its best: a good story, elegantly told, and a joy to watch.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Put aside the finery, eloquent dialogue and sublime acting, and you have a marvelous odd couple farce featuring Bertie and Lionel, a timid, tongue-tied king and a casual, self-assured commoner.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Not merely a spot-on period piece; it's also a heartfelt study in the shadings of courage, a film about duty and friendship that's often warmly funny and sometimes painful to watch.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The King's Speech is a warm, wise film -- the best period movie of the year and one of the year's best movies, period.
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| Original Score: 4/4
A fully satisfying and uplifting period piece that achieves its dramatic potential without sacrificing historical accuracy.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Let's say it without equivocation: Colin Firth deserves an Oscar for his lead role in The King's Speech as the stammering King George VI.
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| Original Score: 4/4
By now we almost take Firth's brilliance for granted. Almost. He's magnificent here, as are Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Although everything can go wrong with a film before it gets to the casting stage, and often does, a couple of marvelous performances can elevate solid, well-carpentered material and make it something special.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
No holiday season would be complete without a starchy British historical drama, and the Weinstein Company obliges us this year with this pleasant story the Duke of York, who had to overcome a serious stammer.
With its rich source material shaped from real-life events, The King's Speech doesn't need to overplay its hand -- especially not with a king waiting in the hole.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
As the speechmaker and his speech teacher, Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush elevate each other's game to the stratosphere and beyond.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Complacent middlebrow tosh engineered for maximum awards bling and catering to a nostalgia for the royalty we've never actually had to live with.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
If the British monarchy is good for nothing else, it's superb at producing the subjects of films.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The King's Speech is a lively burst of populist rhetoric, superbly performed and guaranteed to please even discriminating crowds.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's the odds-on favourite to win Best Picture at the next Academy Awards in February, and deservedly so.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Among many other good things, The King's Speech, directed by Tom Hooper and written by David Seidler, is a meditation on a transitional time when royalty was expected to speak to the nation and not just pose commandingly before it.
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| Original Score: A
Both actors completely inhabit their absorbing roles, relishing the opportunity their exchanges provide and adding unlooked-for layers to a complicated human relationship.
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| Original Score: 4/5
One of the many remarkable things about The King's Speech is how this subtle film's central relationship speaks to the divisions between people.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Director Tom Hooper...could here be said to cross up underdog-biopic expectations in what amounts to a high-toned, elegantly upholstered buddy flick.
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| Original Score: 10/10
The King's Speech has been crafted to serve as an actors' showcase first and foremost and Firth and Rush don't disappoint.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The King's Speech -- a crowning achievement powered by a dream cast -- digs vibrant human drama out of the dry dust of history.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a warm, richly funny and highly enjoyable human story that takes an intriguing sideways glance at a crucial period in 20th-century history.
A prestige film of enormous likability when it remembers to be a reverse My Fair Lady.
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| Original Score: 3/5
A picnic for Anglophiles, not to mention a prospective Oscar bonanza for the brothers Weinstein, The King's Speech is a well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor.
... as a genteel middlebrow entertainment, [this] is largely very well-played indeed, and thus deserves to do well.
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| Original Score: 4/5
If you can get past the nagging sensation that what you're watching is a cynical calculation to appeal to the Academy, well, you'll be delighted, because the The King's Speech is undeniably charming.
There is a kernel to this movie which feels harder and more stubborn than the pleasing, period fluff that enfolds it.
The sense of period is strong and made especially real in scenes in which royalty find themselves incongruously in small, distinctly non-palatial homes.
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| Original Score: 4/5
It's a prizewinning combination, terribly English and totally Hollywood, and Firth is, once more, uncanny: He evokes, in mid-stammer, existential dread.
The King's Speech adheres to every rule in the Oscar playbook.
Colin Firth excels as England's shy, repressed, stammering monarch, George VI (aka "Bertie"), in a performance that's deftly matched, syllable for syllable, by Geoffrey Rush.
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| Original Score: 4/4
It's a rare combination of crowd-pleaser and triumphant artistry.
A riveting, intimate account at how a British king triumphed over a speech impediment with the help of an unorthodox speech coach.
A stirring, handsomely mounted tale of unlikely friendship starring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush.
