August Rush: Critic Reviews

To describe August Rush as a piece of shameless hokum doesn't quite do justice to the potentially shock-inducing sugar content of this contemporary fairy tale.

Watching this yucky emotional drama is like being sprayed with treacle from a high-pressure hose.

August Rush will not be for everyone, but it works if you surrender to its lilting and unabashedly sentimental tale of evocative music and visual poetry.

Intended as a fuzzy family fable, August plays more to the gag reflex than to the heart.

If August Rush is a fairy tale, it's an excruciatingly, sometimes hilariously oblivious one.

It would be nice to say this predictable fantasy has such a big heart, we can forgive its excesses. But director Kirsten Sheridan overplays nearly every already-corny scene.

The goal is to drive mothers everywhere insane with the urge to rescue him and brush his hair (or the other way around), and in my case it worked.

I dislike sentimentality where it doesn't belong, but there's something brave about the way August Rush declares itself and goes all the way with coincidence, melodrama and skillful tear-jerking.

It's an unabashed feel-good weeper, and those eager for that type of fare might as well settle for this one. But an equal number will be put off by the bad dialogue, transparent manipulation and saccharine overkill.

An exercise in dissonance.

With its musical themes for individual characters that come together symphonically at the climax, the music is so persuasive that it carries the narrative rather than complementing it.

If Charles Dickens were alive today, he might be writing projects like August Rush, the unabashedly sentimental tale of a plucky orphan lad who falls in with streetwise urchins as he seeks the family he ought to have.

Director Kirsten Sheridan's new film is August Rush. But she might as well have named it Oliver! 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Many of the so-called twists feel strained, though preteens are unlikely to complain, and there's nothing here to really frighten an even younger crowd.

This is the sort of movie that requires you not only to suspend disbelief, but to check your sanity at the ticket counter.

For all its patently absurd situations, its occasionally cloying characters and its naked tugs at the old heartstrings, August Rush still finds a way, every so often, of dropping a lump into your throat.

Exuberantly bad and strenuously preposterous.

It's hard to believe in the magical power of music to heal and connect lost souls when the tunes are lame.

An aggressively bad movie. There are times when it tips the scales of absurdity and becomes almost comical.

An often charming urban fantasy that teeters perilously on the brink of preciousness but never quite topples over.

We need to break out a whole new definition of cheesiness for a film like this, augmented by fake tears and vomit gestures.

August Rush feels like the cinematic equivalent of being stuffed with fruitcake and doused with a gallon of egg nog.

A music box trying to pass itself off as an orchestra.

A heartwarming fairy-tale that is undeniably sweet, even if it occasionally crosses over into sappiness.