'The Road' Movie Reviews

Manifesting novelist Cormac McCarthy's bleak post-apocalyptic vision onto the big screen is the kind of challenging task that won't please everyone. But for the most part, critics like -- with reservations -- what director John Hillcoat has done with 'The Road,' which stars Viggo Mortensen as a father trying to teach his son how to survive -- and be civilized -- in a gray world with only a few other desperate humans left on it.

Here's what the critics are saying about 'The Road.' Entertainment Weekly: "Yet 'The Road,' for all its vivid desolation, remains a curiously unmoving experience -- or maybe not so curious, given that nothing really happens in it. In the novel, McCarthy played off postapocalyptic Hollywood thrillers, and so he gave you the heady feeling that you were seeing a movie unfold on the page.

Yet he brought off that feat without much action; the backdrop was grand, the emotions interior and refined. That's a problem when 'The Road' is done as a movie: It's like a zombie thriller drowning in tastefully severe art-house gloom. "

The Hollywood Reporter: "In 'The Road,' director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale, even at the cost of sacrificing color, big scenes and standard Hollywood imagery of post-apocalyptic America. Shot through with a bleak intensity and pessimism that offers little hope for a better tomorrow, the film is more suitable to critical appreciation than to attracting huge audiences though topliners Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron will attract initial business."

Variety: "This 'Road' leads nowhere. If you're going to adapt a book like Cormac McCarthy's 2006 bestseller, you're pretty much obliged to make a terrific film or it's not worth doing -- first because expectations are high, and second, because the picture needs to make it worth people's while to sit through something so grim. 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."

The New York Times: "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. A grimy, damp fog hangs over everything, and instead of birdsong there is the eerie creak and crash of falling trees. Vehicles sit abandoned on highways, houses stand looted and vacant, and what used to be towns are afterimages of violence and wreckage."