World Trade Center: Critic Reviews

As a tribute to those who died, and survived, on Sept. 11, World Trade Center is a scrupulous and honorable film.

Oliver Stone has taken a public tragedy and turned it into something at once genuinely stirring and terribly sad.

It's almost as if Stone wants to ingratiate himself with the mainstream public that rejected his historical blockbuster Alexander and win the approval of his right-wing critics.

Stone takes one of the most tragic events of this century and focuses on the hope, humanity and determination that also held sway amid the darkness.

It shortchanges audiences when it comes to dramatic revelations that could have resonated on a deeper level. It telegraphs its emotions loud and clear, but somehow they don't reach us.

Oliver Stone has made an honorable film, in other words, and almost the best thing I can say about it is that it doesn't feel like an Oliver Stone movie.

The surprising thing about this commission job, directed from Andrea Berloff's script, is not its factuality but its restraint.

This as uncomplicated a movie as Stone (Born on the 4th of July, JFK) has made, and one of his most powerful.

The filmmaker and his colleagues have brought the sensibility of an old-fashioned Hollywood disaster movie, and a mediocre one at that.

It displays optimism, patriotism, emotional frankness and faith. Detractors might call it sentimental. Most of all, it exhibits no political slant whatsoever, injecting only heartfelt empathy for the day's many victims and heroes.

Some comedies appeal to our inner child, while some horror movies appeal to our inner masochist. Oliver Stone's World Trade Center poignantly appeals to our inner patriot.

World Trade Center approaches drama's potent promise, finding in the story of two individuals and their families uncommon valor and common ground at ground zero.

Their film is gripping -- and should be: It has its tentacles around you from its stark title on. It's a title that means so many things to so many people.

The world may not make sense anymore, but Oliver Stone, a warrior still, celebrating courage and endurance, has, in his own way, come home.

[T]here's much discussion about whether audiences are 'ready' to see a mainstream movie about the events of 9/11... That's your choice, but you'll be missing one of the best films of the year.

World Trade Center is the second major studio picture to weigh in on the events of Sept. 11, 2001. It is a more limited achievement: a comfortably unsettling drama.

The story of what they experienced is gripping and inspiring, but however true it is to their lives... the way it's told restricts what the movie can say about the larger tragedy.

[A] humanist movie of enormous empathy.

It looks at the tragedy on intimate, personal terms, with a sensitivity and restraint the macho provocateur has rarely revealed before.

World Trade Center hits us where we live. And it reminds us how lucky we are to live, and love, and even struggle.

With this unflinching account of that day, Stone has made the most important film of his long career.

[World Trade Center] doesn't pretend to encompass the entire catastrophe of 9/11, and that is its great negative virtue.

... World Trade Center yields lovely and touching moments but proves a slow-going, arduous movie experience ...

An expertly crafted, respectful piece of inspirational filmmaking.

It's easily the best movie of the summer.