The Road: Critic Reviews

89%

MovieWeb: 12 reviews

75%

Rotten Tomatoes: 200 reviews

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Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly (Top Critic)

59

The Road, for all its vivid desolation, remains a curiously unmoving experience.
Full Review » 3 years ago
A.O. Scott New York Times (Top Critic)

60

The most arresting aspect of The Road is just how fully the filmmakers have realized this bleak, blighted landscape of a modern society reduced to savagery.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Peter Bradshaw Guardian [UK] (Top Critic)

60

It is an inexpressibly painful subject and Hillcoat has brought it to the screen with great intelligence.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Claudia Puig USA Today (Top Critic)

88

While the film is not as resonant as the novel, it is an honorable adaptation, capturing the essence of the bond between father and son.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Ann Hornaday Washington Post (Top Critic)

63

The Road possesses undeniable sweep and a grim kind of grandeur, but it ultimately plays like a zombie movie with literary pretensions.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Ty Burr Boston Globe (Top Critic)

63

In adapting this harsh, unyielding book for the screen, Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall pull their punches the slightest degree and thus too much.
Full Review » 3 years ago
J. Hoberman Village Voice (Top Critic)

Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning, Oprah-endorsed, post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem... was a quick, lacerating read. John Hillcoat's literal adaptation is, by contrast, a long, dull slog.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Joe Neumaier New York Daily News (Top Critic)

80

This adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is intense and, yes, depressing -- and earns every minute that it rattles inside your head.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Joe Morgenstern Wall Street Journal (Top Critic)

You hang on to yourself for dear life, resisting belief as best you can in the face of powerful acting, persuasive filmmaking and the perversely compelling certainty that nothing will turn out all right.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Amy Biancolli Houston Chronicle (Top Critic)

75

My, but it's been a fine year for Armageddon.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Lisa Kennedy Denver Post (Top Critic)

63

This is a willfully, skillfully crafted film with insufficient heart to the task it undertakes. It never fully connects us to love amid its ruins.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Kathleen Murphy MSN Movies (Top Critic)

50

... what remains of 'The Road' is an honorable failure, given there was never any real hope of translating McCarthy's style-driven novel into film.
Full Review » 3 years ago
David Edelstein New York Magazine (Top Critic)

Evocative as it is, The Road comes up short, not because it's bleak but because it's monotonous, and because McCarthy's vision is finally as inflexible as his patriarchal hero's.
Full Review » 4 years ago
Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times (Top Critic)

88

The Road evokes the images and the characters of Cormac McCarthy's novel. It is powerful, but for me lacks the same core of emotional feeling. I'm not sure this is any fault of the filmmakers.
Full Review » 4 years ago
Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune (Top Critic)

63

Already, Hillcoat's film has divided critics on the international festival circuit. The one constant is the praise, rightly so, for Mortensen.
Full Review » 3 years ago
J. R. Jones Chicago Reader (Top Critic)

Hillcoat gives [the postapocalypse] an unnerving solidity by focusing on the drab details of survival and linking them to the more hellish aspects of modern American life.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Steven Rea Philadelphia Inquirer (Top Critic)

75

I cannot think of another film this year that has stayed with me, its images of dread and fear -- and yes, perhaps hope -- kicking around like such a terrible dream.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Colin Covert Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top Critic)

100

John Milton described hell as "darkness visible." That is the grim, mesmerizing world that director John Hillcoat creates here.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Tom Long Detroit News (Top Critic)

67

The Road -- centered by Mortensen's typically physical but tempered performance -- is hard to watch. But it could have been much harder. Hillcoat isn't doing opera here, he's doing tragedy.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Bill Goodykoontz Arizona Republic (Top Critic)

80

The Road can be a tough slog, but the journey is a rewarding one.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Rex Reed New York Observer (Top Critic)

Viggo Mortensen gives the performance of his career in the faithfully rendered film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's heartbreaking apocalyptic novel The Road.
Full Review » 4 years ago
Todd McCarthy Variety (Top Critic)

Except for the physical aspects of this bleak odyssey by a father and son through a post-apocalyptic landscape, this long-delayed production falls dispiritingly short on every front.
Full Review » 4 years ago
Kyle Smith New York Post (Top Critic)

50

Zombieland was the same movie with laughs, but if you take away the comedy, what is left? Nothing, on a vast scale.
Full Review » 3 years ago
Peter Howell Toronto Star (Top Critic)

88

How could anything so bleak be so promising?
Full Review » 3 years ago
Eric D. Snider Film.com (Top Critic)

67

This year's entry in the Movies You Admire and Respect but Don't Ever Want to Watch Again Sweepstakes.
Full Review » 3 years ago