Dances with Wolves: Critic Reviews

[A] beautiful and soft-headed frontier epic, which looks at Native Americans through New Age-colored glasses.

Its triumph is that it is never exactly boring, only dulled. It's a movie in acute need of sharpening.

A stunning combination of all-American boyishness and sweeping grandeur.

Costner (with Michael Blake's screenplay) creates a vision so childlike, so willfully romantic, it's hard to put up a fight.

A simple story, magnificently told.

Sincere, capable, at times moving, but overextended, this picture is seriously hampered by its tendency to linger over everything -- especially landscapes with silhouetted figures, and not excluding its own good intentions.

In his directorial debut, Kevin Costner brings a rare degree of grace and feeling to this elegiac tale.

Recalls the sweep as well as the intimacy of a David Lean epic.

It's a rousing adventure, a touching romance, and a stirring drama.

As a director, Costner is alive to the sweep of the country and the expansive spirit of the western-movie tradition.

Costner went for broke with his large-scale, Panavision epic... [Blu-ray]

a nuanced and thoughtful portrayal of cultures both clashing and finding common ground

Dances with Wolves is as genuine an artistic triumph as they come; a spellbinding American classic that tastes the tears of a country in the midst of all its incomparable beauty.

A masterful, painstakingly crafted adventure about the nature of acceptance, and the tragedy of human nature.

A grand, sweeping journey of the heart.

Plodding, simplistic and overlong politically correct Western epic.

The film's real joy rests in Costner's meticulous attention to historical detail, creating a world that is both moving and credible.

The political correctness is so politically correct and sappy and sucky and conscience-appeasing and politically-pacifying and just generally brain-numbing

No one can doubt Kevin Costner's sincerity or vision.

An epic film that without its lead might have been better.

Not a great film by any standard, this is a western for people who are completely ignorant about the genre.

One of the best films of our time. The finest achievement of Kevin Costner's career.

While the movie is not really revisionist or a new type of Western, it's a mass-oriented film in its middlebrow sensibility and acceptable message about the co-existence between the White Man and Native Americans.

Once you're sucked into the leisurely narrative, it's hard to resist.

The high-water mark of Kevin Costner's career.