Walk the Line: Critic Reviews

A big, juicy, enjoyable wide-canvas biography with a handful of indelible moments, but it's just compelling enough to make you wish that it had attained the level of artistry of those other films.

Johnny Cash gets the musical biopic treatment in this moderately entertaining, never quite convincing chronicle of his early years.

A Johnny Cash biopic equally packed with music and frustrated love, Walk the Line goes from compelling to enthralling.

The musical sequences are the best thing about Walk the Line, and luckily they are plentiful.

The film sends you home moved and in a tuneful mood.

It doesn't leave you with much to think about, except maybe the empty vibrato of effective ventriloquism.

Mangold was wisely generous with the amount of musical performance he included in the film, and the later scenes -- showing Cash and Carter as partners -- are so well shot and edited, they defy you to sit still.

Joaquin Phoenix isn't Johnny Cash. But with the clip-clop of rhythms behind him, aiming his guitar like a gun, he puts on one sensational show.

In summary, it sounds like Ray revisited. But Walk the Line has its own provocative style and a group of outstanding performances.

While Cash and Carter's music gives the movie its undeniable soundtrack, it's their thwarted yet constant tale of friendship and love that makes Walk the Line a big-movie pleasure.

This movie is a lot less interesting than it might be. Though it's not bad -- in fact, it's rather sweet -- it's too simple a portrait of a very complicated and calculating entertainer.

Johnny Cash sang like he meant business...Walk the Line, with its dead-on performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, helps you understand that quality.

You won't go out humming the filmmaking, but Walk the Line showcases two of this year's most vivid screen performances.

It's a celebration of the good times and bad times shared by a man and woman who found each other in the middle of some historic craziness, and it rocks.

There's no mistaking the sound of Johnny Cash, and Walk the Line gets it just right.

Walk the Line is absolute standard biopic stuff, so familiar that it blatantly echoes last year's Ray, which similarly failed to do justice to the legendary Ray Charles.

In Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix doesn't look exactly like Johnny Cash. He doesn't sound exactly like Cash, either. But he is Johnny Cash.

I advise you catch up with Walk the Line, if only for Ms. Witherspoon's transcendent joyousness as a still-growing legend within a legend.

It's the curious fact that for a man so revered, a movie about his life should be so unexceptional.

Walk the Line is a strongly acted, musically vibrant, conventionally satisfying biopic.

Walk the Line is the only movie I've seen three times this year -- and I'd happily watch it again and again.

Walk the Line is a spirited and winning reminder of the man before he became the legend, of the giant shadow he cast, and of the remarkable woman who cast her shadow over him.

Most Johnny Cash fans probably don't care that much about how their hero ended up with June Carter. Therein resides the main problem with Walk the Line's devotion to simple truth over cherished fable.