Taking Woodstock

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Taking Woodstock has the freshness of something being created, not remembered.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams

Taiwanese director Ang Lee sees the '60s through a rose-colored telephoto lens, but his sympathetic spirit extends the generous message of the hippie era like a passed joint.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

This is very light material, and, unusually for a Lee picture, not everybody in the ensemble appears to be acting in the same universe, let alone the same story. On the other hand: It’s fun.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Ang Lee adds to the mythology with the sweet, gentle Taking Woodstock.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Lee distills the flavor of this transforming event and hints at how it transformed some who were there. His movie is a contact high.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to be there - to actually be there, man - this movie gets it.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

A love letter to the time, and the period, and the legend that has grown around both. Maybe it's all too wonderful to be true, but that's OK. If Taking Woodstock is a fantasy, then it's a most benevolent one, and more power to it.

New Orleans Times-Picayune Mike Scott

Lee keeps things afloat with an appealing air of levity, including a fun but restrained use of split-screen, an homage to the 1970 doc, as well as cameos by that movie's Port-O-San guy and its peace-sign-flashing nuns.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

This likable, humane movie is not an attempt to recreate the epochal Woodstock Music and Art Fair captured in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary “Woodstock.” It is essentially a small, intimate film into which is fitted a peripheral view of the landmark event.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

It's a low-wattage film about a high-wattage event. Which is somewhat disappointing, though you do get a thoughtful, playful, often amusing film about what happened backstage at one of the '60s' great happenings.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Lee has always had an affinity for innocence and an abiding affection for outcasts, and both traits serve him well in Taking Woodstock -- but only up to a point. Beyond that point, where sanctification meets reality, the film floats up, up, and away.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Lee captures the fractious, joyful, monstrously evolving mass it all was.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Somehow Lee fails to make it speak to us. His heart is in the right place, but like many of the crowd that swarmed Yasgur's farm, he has rather lost his head.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

This is as safe and sweet a movie as you could make about America’s sex-drugs-and-rock ’n’ roll-est event.

USA Today Claudia Puig

This is Woodstock from another perspective -- one without Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The movie hits its stride when it deals directly with the concert. The more peripheral Elliot is to the story, the better things become.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The film's major sin of omission: the music.

Empire Philip Wilding

One man’s near-emotionless trip through an event that was the high watermark for US counterculture moves along without any real sense of purpose or pace.

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

Something of a traffic jam--even with his usual restraint, Lee couldn't recount a key moment of the '60s without a blurry parade of personalities--and also lullingly dull.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Lee’s movie is pleasant enough, but it’s too swept up in the spirit it’s celebrating to ask the relevant questions.

Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

It's a frustrating complication of a movie with a sprawling story and grand ambitions -- and some truly grand acting -- that stumbles almost as often as it soars. Bummer.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Awfully amiable and dull. Instead of honoring musical gods, the film seems to think Pat Boone was headlining.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

You can’t deny the smiling mood that wafts through the film like incense, and to that extent it honors the original three days; but not once does a character’s show of feeling stir you, send you, or stop you in your tracks, and the loss is unsustainable.

Variety Todd McCarthy

The picture serves up intermittent pleasures but is too raggedy and laid-back for its own good, its images evaporating nearly as soon as they hit the screen.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

So gentle it barely has enough vitality to stick to the screen.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Elliot’s coming-out story is mostly shunted into the film’s latter half, and when it does emerge it is woefully conventional and diluted by other goings-on.

Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

The screenplay is sharp and insightful, the period details ring true, and Martin is appealing as a dreamer conflicted about his homosexuality. But once the action shifts from the town to the festival, any momentum gets lost in a psychedelic haze.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Ultimately, even Lee appears to lose interest, flashing none of his usual visual panache and, at the end, content to forego any considered conclusion for a hunk of lumpy irony.

NPR Scott Tobias

Taking Woodstock has a winning generosity of spirit, but even that serves chiefly to underline the film's curious inconsequentiality, as if it were a two-hour pilot for a show about a charmingly eccentric family and a rotating cast of colorful guest stars.

Wall Street Journal Joanne Kaufman

The gentle, ambling Ang Lee comedy that's a few tokes short of groovy.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

A choppy and occasionally unsure film, one that doesn't achieve the superb tonal control of "The Ice Storm," but that certainly doesn't represent an unqualified disaster on a par with Lee's first attempt at the western, "Ride With the Devil."

Slate Dana Stevens

No one's asking for a song-by-song re-enactment of the concert, but Lee's refusal to focus even for a moment on the musical aspect of the festival starts to feel almost perverse, as if he's deliberately frustrating the audience's desire.

Village Voice Melissa Anderson

Little music from the concert itself is heard. On display instead are inane, occasionally borderline offensive portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares, and freaks.

Time Out New York Keith Uhlich

Lee and Schamus make history blandly palatable; in the process, they rob the times and the people they’re portraying of their complications.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock achieves an amazing feat: It turns the fabled music festival, a key cultural moment of the late 20th century, into an exceedingly lame, heavily clichéd, thumb-sucking bore.