Invictus: Critic Reviews

The film's speechifying is at times overexplicit, yet Freeman lets the words breathe, and Damon, as the cautious Afrikaner brought to a higher place by Mandela's authority, acts with a 
 coolly impassive fervor.

It's an exciting sports movie, an inspiring tale of prejudice overcome and, above all, a fascinating study of political leadership.

A monolithic sporting saga that seems content to pose on the podium, lulled by the belief that its subject matter provides inspiration enough.

The title may mean nothing to you, but the movie certainly will.

Morgan Freeman doesn't play Mandela as much as inhabit the man, in a performance that seems to embody the very transcendence that Mandela himself has come to stand for.

Can a story on this scale function as compelling drama? I actually think that's what interests Eastwood the most here: the challenge of making historical figures move with the grace of remembered life.

Invictus is stately, handsomely mounted, attentive to detail right down to the Marmite adorning the team's breakfast buffet, and relentlessly conventional.

Morgan Freeman's performance as Nelson Mandela in Invictus is, like Clint Eastwood's film as a whole, constructed of deliberate decisions and never feels false.

A win-win situation in which a mainstream feature works equally well as stirring entertainment and a history lesson about a remarkable convergence of sports and statesmanship.

Eastwood makes moving pictures that seldom collapse under the burden of sentiment. He has a muscular understanding of how kernels of wisdom needn't become caramel corn.

Invictus" is only interested in South Africa and the challenges of reconciliation as a background setting and inspiring theme, not as a real place or a real problem; it's a thin, hollow shell designed expressly to be coated in Oscar gold.

Clint Eastwood, a master director, orchestrates all of these notes and has us loving Mandela, proud of Francois and cheering for the plucky Springboks. A great entertainment.

Freeman goes only so far with a dialect, and the script barely gets into Mandela's complexities, but the performance feels fresh and spontaneous. Damon is becoming one of the truest, most reliable actors of his generation.

Anthony Peckham's script is formulaic, woodenly reverent, and devoid of real dramatic tension.

It may look like a movie-of-the-week and it certainly has some wincingly bad musical passages, but Invictus is an entertaining movie about a masterful piece of political theater.

It's a film of big themes played out on a grand scale, a story of races and generations making an effort to connect.

A work of flawed majesty.

Eastwood too often veers into trite territory, undercutting some of the story's power. An unlikely World Cup run may be a soothing balm on a nation's wounds, but it's not a cure-all, no matter how inspiring it may be.

The film is flawed, rambling and much too long, but in the end it leaves the audience cheering.

Inspirational on the face of it, Clint Eastwood's film has a predictable trajectory, but every scene brims with surprising details that accumulate into a rich fabric of history, cultural impressions and emotion.

Depicts an unlikely intersection of sports and leadership in ways that manage to be inspiring and insightful without ever becoming schmaltzy or preachy.

Eastwood, returning to race as a theme, has made a timely film about a nation of many races rallying around a leader who understands symbolism.

As always, Eastwood brings solid craftsmanship to the proceedings, with direction that allows the actors to breathe while remaining alert to small details that speak of greater wisdom.

What Eastwood has done is to assemble a cast of American and South African actors and allow them to create something moving, exciting, and improbably true.

The story of how Nelson Mandela chose the white-supported national rugby team, the Springboks, to become a symbol of national reconciliation is uncharacteristically optimistic for Eastwood.