Popular reviews

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  Review by Jay ★★★ 7

  therapy: expensive

  tom hanks as mr rogers breaking the forth wall asking how you deal with anger: free (or the cost of a cinema ticket )

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★½ 4

  There's a moment in this where Tom Hanks/Mr. Rogers looks right at the camera and into your soul for a solid 20 seconds, and it's simultaneously beautiful and terrifying, as if maybe this is the last thing you'll ever see. Rest of the movie is pretty good too.

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  Review by maria ★★★½ 10

  tom hanks wasn't even acting here, he's just always like this

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  Review by Karst ★★★ 7

  Heller’s filmmaking is so warm and inviting. She has the ability to take character’s who on the surface feel like supporting characters in real life and makes them protagonists (obviously referring to Llyod, not Mr. Rogers.) That said, while she held my attention with his character, the performance from Matthew Rhys felt pretty cartoonish and stereotypical. Same with Chris Cooper, he didn’t really feel believable till the last 20 minutes. The editing was interesting and I appreciate the stylistic choices that were made but in some ways it threw off the structure. But back to Heller, her slow patient style worked insanely well with an award-worthy performance from Hanks (still team Dafoe, don’t worry.) Can’t wait to see what she does next.

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★½ 3

  Saw this a couple days ago and can't stop thinking about how even though Tom Hanks doesn't look or sound much like Mr. Rogers, he irradiates the exact right sort of decency where I instantly believe it's him. What a nice guy.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 2

  "Another chance to grow." What at first appears to be simplistic and saccharine on the surface soon revealed for me a current underneath of the amount of effort and very real, difficult work it takes to manage your feelings on a micro level and be genuinely considerate of others. Heller directs the shit out of it.

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  Review by David Sims ★★★★ 2

  Marielle Heller is for real

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  Review by Houston Coley ★★★★ 7

  I watched this over the shoulder of the person in front of me on an airplane, and it still made me cry.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★ 9

  73

  What a strange, lovely movie. After the success of Won't You Be My Neighbor?, I wasn't sure what else could be said about Mr. Rogers, but Marielle Heller complicates his persona and the reality of his ethos in really fascinating ways, and she dives right into the often unbearable trauma of the lead reporter of Lloyd Vogel. Their conversations are full of truth and unsettling developments, and accompanied by a performance by Tom Hanks that rattles the idea of Mr. Rogers as a person. It isn't necessarily an expose, as Lloyd initially wanted to do for Esquire, but Hanks depicts an open, kind-hearted individual who often loses sight of himself in his generosity to others, and Heller isn't afraid…

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★ 8

  I didn’t grow up with Mr. Rogers and only know him as a legendarily kind figure of great renown, so seeing him depicted doesn’t do much for me. I had this same sort of apathy issue with Won’t You Be My Neighbor? last year, which was sweet but largely ineffectual for me. I think where this one lost me just a little more is by casting someone as bombastic as Hanks as a quiet figure, because it just feels like he’s performatively whispering through the whole film. A great performance, and a very wonderful film- but it was hard for me to not just see Quiet Tom Hanks. There’s also a very meditative nature to this movie that makes Hanks’s whisper-performance feel almost...... sinister at times. Like it’s building tension for something to come. Which it was not.

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  Review by Lucy ★★★ 1

  a strange mix of such profound truth and mundane mediocrity. the central plot could have been about any person and any family, but that kind of feels like the point, because mr rogers cared so much about anyone and everyone. but that doesn’t make it any less dull. moments here will stick with me, but otherwise it lost me

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★

  A story about a fantastical place and time where journalists work for print publications that send them on expensive trips to conduct 20 minute interviews in order to write a 400-word puff pieces about an impossibly kind and empathetic man who has a television show where he counsels children and helps them to be better people without trying to sell them something.

  I never really got past Tom Hanks’ Hanksiness in the role — he doesn’t sound like Mr. Rogers and he doesn’t really look like him all that much either — but that’s not a dealbreaker, in part because the movie is less about Fred Rogers than about his spirit and lessons. Marielle Heller, who made the wonderful The Diary…