8 Mile: Critic Reviews

Gritty and electrifying.

The movie is a success on its own terms because the director doesn't condescend to pop music.

The problem is Eminem himself, who has clearly been drilled by the director to play to what will have to pass as strengths: stillness, cool, control.

Eminem steals the picture from a cast with snap down to the smallest parts.

The payoff comes after an hour and a half of a long, criminally tiresome setup.

[Eminem] does a lot of things right. So does the movie.

8 Mile continues the director's visual tour of America's underbelly that heated up with L.A. Confidential and continued with the Pittsburgh of Wonder Boys.

A canny, and largely successful, attempt to broaden the star's appeal.

8 Mile is entertaining to an extent. Our enjoyment is muted because the movie has an agenda.

The climactic 20 minutes or so represent the most electrifying depiction of rap that the multiplex is likely to see, a torrent of word-slinging packed with atmosphere and ribald drama.

Making the city look grimy and lonely, dark and wasted but still alive with people who care, the film gets you rooting for the guys who want to make 'Mo' (short for Motown) a major player.

Who could have predicted that a rap movie starring Eminem would, at its best, be one of the year's sweetest joyrides?

We are hardly started in 8 Mile, and already we see that this movie stands aside from routine debut films by pop stars ... Like Prince's Purple Rain, it is the real thing.

Set in Detroit's 8 Mile, the dividing line between the city limits and the northern suburbs, 8 Mile is an exciting, well-crafted movie, loaded with urban atmosphere.

The movie has some of the braggadocio of its white-trash hero, building to its competitive climax as if it were a gladiatorial sporting event, and it carried me all the way.

8 Mile should satisfy Eminem's legion of fans and, at the same time, affirms rap's power as an artform, as real beat poetry, for the uninitiated -- and even for the actively resistant.

Like the recently released 'Welcome to Collinwood' from Cleveland's Russo brothers, Curtis Hanson's '8 Mile' brings affection and honesty in equal measure to its tale of impoverished middle-Americans determined to get a better life -- on their own terms.

the Profane One's performance in 8 Mile is more Britney than Brando. As with Ms. Belly Button in the vapid Crossroads, Eminem plays himself, albeit a cleaned-up, deep-thinking, saintlike version.

I have to go back to James Dean in Elia Kazan's East of Eden and Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 to find a comparably jolting piece of male aggressiveness coupled with bottled-up vulnerability.

O.K., so I'm the wrong audience for this teenage junk.

Eminem is magnetic playing a version of himself.

What makes 8 Mile transcend the formulaic nature of its plot is the way it makes these rap competitions compelling even for those unfamiliar with rap music, and its scrupulous, loving rendition of a grim, wintry Detroit circa 1995.

8 Mile is worth a look if only to watch Eminem on the big screen. Even when a film's a bit lame, it's always fun to be there when a star is being born.