Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope: Critic Reviews

It's fun and funny.

George Lucas has made the kind of sci-fi adventure movie you dream about finding!

Lucas fills his screen with loving touches.

Grandiose but good-hearted epic!

None of these characters has any depth, and they're all treated like the fanciful props and settings!

A magnificent film. George Lucas set out to make the biggest possible adventure fantasy out of his memories of serials and older action epics, and he succeeded brilliantly.

Backgrounds in some sequences are now more populated than they were, and it's fun to see all the creatures that make up the "wretched hive of scum and villainy" that Alec Guinness' Obi-Wan Kenobi describes.

A dynamic entertainment, efficiently and exuberantly setting up its mythic tale of heroes and villains, rebels and rogues, princesses and monsters, good and evil.

Like some indefatigable King of the Hill, it stands alone and triumphant, regardless of the many imitators that assail its position.

A grand and glorious film that may well be the smash hit of 1977, and certainly is the best movie of the year so far.

It is, all in all, hard to think of a place or an age group that would not respond to the enthusiastic inventiveness with which Lucas has enshrined his early loves.

Like it or not, Star Wars is a seminal movie that began a whole cycle of sci-fi works and also launched the careers of many actors and craftsmen.

First of a sci-fi phenomenon, #4 in the series.

Lucas consegue imprimir energia a direcao e estabelece seus personagens como figuras imediatamente iconicas, mesmo que, aqui e ali, seus pessimos dialogos comprometam a experiencia.

It is a sweeping epic with classical themes lifted from the teachings of Joseph Campbell, but it maintains strong central characters.

After Star Wars, movies not only spawned profitable kids' toys; they merged with kids' toys, and basically became toys themselves.

On the basic level of simple entertainment it succeeds as well as any film ever has.

So, is this the best film of all time? Certainly not. But it definitely is one of the most enduring, and it's hard not to be seduced.

Has distinct limitations, but the current return to a cinema of spectacle and wonder is wholly encouraging.

Puts most recent 'epic' blockbuster mediocrities to shame.

Lucas' trilogy earned its place in eternity not for its mechanical precision, but for its intangible qualities of inspiration and wonder.

...the key to the movie's success is its creation of a family of characters we can love and believe in.

The movie, modeled after old-fashioned Westerns and Joseph Campbell's writings about mythology, also has a sweet innocence.

classic

The special effects wizardry seen in Star Wars is put in aid of a pure 1930s space opera pulp story . . .