Wonder Boys: Critic Reviews

The humor is forced and the absurdist elements overwhelm the realism.

Michael Douglas gives the best perfromance of his career (to be remembered at Oscar time) in this screwball comedy about a college professor who's pushed into maturity by forces beyond his control; a well-acted coming-of-age saga for adults.

Big disappointment.

Get going, you laggards.

This grand mess of a movie has many pleasures.

Like a favorite novel, "Wonder Boys" gets more comfortably broken-in with each return, and Michael Douglas wears Grady Tripp's scruffiness as sharply as he does Gordon Gekko's natty clothes - addressing jealousy, panic and terror in creative complacency.

One of those films where the term 'character study' is used to excuse the fact that there's nothing of real interest in the story.

If Douglas and Hanson have aimed to make Grady as simultaneously weary and jazzed...as Bob Dylan's Oscar-winning theme song is, they have come enticingly close, with marvelous highs along the way (not just the narcotic kind), but they haven't fully got th

Writer Steven Kloves and director Curtis Hanson turn Michael Chabon's novel into a quirky goofball pleasure.

As Tripp, Michael Douglas, looking hugely disheveled, does his best work in years; playing a real character after so many pictures in which he's glided by on an air of silken yuppiness, he proves that he's still a true actor.

...smart, charming, and funny ... It's about finding the right inspiration and making the right choices. Hanson and Kloves, it's abundantly clear, made a lot of right choices.

Wonder Boys digresses so entertainingly, you forget how quickly Grady got into the mess he's in, and can't imagine where we might be headed.

Don't let the lame marketing for this film turn you off, this film is surprisingly enjoyable.

I've never quite seen a movie like Wonder Boys. It is sometimes self-deprecating, often nostalgic and optimistic, but always slightly mysterious.

Veterans and relative newcomers populate the talented cast, led by Douglas in one of his best-rendered performances to date.

Wonder Boys has a delightfully malicious beginning, an increasingly muddled second act and a conclusion of such moral uplift that it probably should not be shown to the characters themselves.

This performance shows Douglas aging gracefully and willingly, an accomplishment that only a couple of famous leading men have achieved in recent years.

There's a story there, but it's probably not very interesting.

It's very refreshing to see a movie that celebrates writing and intelligence without stooping to become a filmed record of a novel.

It's so rare that I can't find anything to nitpick about in a movie.

Douglas is exquisitely subtle in this film; I love it when he takes time out from playing wealthy, power-hungry jerks to craft a real character, and this one is not an easy creation.

...a movie of small pleasures and gentle comedy. One has to be careful not to overpraise it.

With so much to say, Hanson's movie is too frenetic.

Given the Weinsteins' genius for Oscar-gathering, don't be surprised if Michael Douglas bags Best Actor come March 2001... Recommended.

This is an amusing, though ultimately unsatisfying, film.