Freedomland: Critic Reviews

Watchable as it is, Freedomland comes to very little, because it keeps showing you the seams of its good intentions.

Freedomland, a lethally dull drama about a white child who may have gone missing in a New Jersey public housing complex, is an early candidate for worst film of the year.

Steer clear of Freedomland, the movie. Your time would be better spent reading Richard Price's much more compelling 1998 novel.

What could have been an unusually smart police procedural becomes a sprawling, overwrought melodrama that itself morphs into a sort of spiritual romance.

Freedomland, an overblown urban crime drama that should be a lot better than it is.

The performances all around are lousy -- histrionic and turgid, a most lethal combination.

The film is dark and claustrophobic, and so confined in its location as to seem more like an adaptation of a play than a novel.

It tries hard and means well. And I couldn't hardly wait for it to end. Freedomland falls short as entertainment.

As more and more plot lines, characters and possibilities enter the picture, Freedomland loses sight of the tensions that set it in motion in the first place.

Freedomland entertains with smarts, reminding us that the resolution of one mystery doesn't necessarily snuff out the fuse it ignited.

Moviemakers who exploit the suffering and death of children to ratchet up the dramatic stakes belong in the innermost circle of hell, but Freedomland -- clumsy and overwrought as it is -- earns the right to its harrowing trajectory.

Freedomland assembles the elements for a superior thriller, but were the instructions lost when the box was opened?

First-rate actors bail out second-rate directors all the time, and Freedomland serves as the latest example.

A monumentally overwrought story of child endangerment, racial antagonism, mob violence and police brutality, it provides some of our finest actors the opportunity to behave like bug-eyed, tinfoil-hat-wearing loonies.

Situations that should have great emotional impact drag on into embarrassing shrillness; moments that are supposed to be heavy become leaden.

In Roth's hands, Freedomland is a civics lesson disguised as a police drama, shrouded in a mystery that's not very mysterious to anyone who has seen the trailer.

What begins as a familiar kind of media-circus melodrama ends up being something much more complex and tangled.

Brimming with high ambitions but disjointed and ultimately unsatisfying.

Freedomland is the kind of dispiriting February botch that makes you wonder if mainstream Hollywood would be better off abandoning serious subjects to the world of specialized film.

Freedomland is so well-acted, so poignantly written, that you can almost forget its excesses and shortcomings and embrace it for what it is -- a serious writer's exploration of racism, cop mob mentality and the mechanics of guilt.

Freedomland is a good idea that got out of control.

Freedomland is, at best, a noble failure, which leaves the charred aftertaste of a burned opportunity.

There are places where you can see a subtler, angrier picture trying to kick its way out of the one you're watching.

The thing that makes Freedomland riveting is the way in which its tale of human tragedy unfolds.