Field of Dreams: Critic Reviews

It seems much easier to fall into Field of Dreams than to resist its warm, intelligent, timely appeal to our most idealistic selves.

Poesy, pointlessness and baseball worship aside, the movie is easy to get along with.

The movie may steal a base here and there, but there are no homers.

The life-equals-baseball masterpiece still packs an unexpected kick.

Field of Dreams will not appeal to grinches and grouches and realists. It is a delicate movie, a fragile construction of one goofy fantasy after another. But it has the courage to be about exactly what it promises.

The conception is sentimental, but the storytelling remains assured and effective.

Field of Dreams sustains a dreamy mood in which the idea of baseball is distilled to its purest essence: a game that stands for unsullied innocence in a cruel, imperfect world.

Despite a lovely cameo turn by Burt Lancaster, Field of Dreams is the male weepie at its wussiest.

[A] gooey fable.

Too idiosyncratic and witty merely to wallow in sentimentality, Field Of Dreams will surely stand as a classic update of what made Old Hollywood so magical. It's still a wonderful life.

Instant baseball classic for whole family.

Widely regarded as a modern populist classic, the film is both a fabulist fable and a celebratory baseball movie that acknowledges scandal within the sport but also the game's transcendent ability to rise above attempts to damage its integrity. [Blu-ray]

One of the best films of the 80s

That rare thing, a poignant movie which manages to drain the tear ducts without ever resorting to cheap manipulation or cliched sentiment.

A rare choke-up movie for guys and one of 1989's biggest hits.

Pure magic.

Quite simply one of the best sports movies ever.

Whether you view it as Capracorn or Capraesque would depend on your values, but there's no denying the film evokes the vastness and grandeur of Middle-America

The best baseball film of all time.

A movie for a thorough tear-duct cleansing - the only film that makes tears stream down the cheeks of this hardened critic, and it gets me at least twice every time.