 Freedomland arrives during that box-office wasteland often called mid-February -- a time, as Manohla Dargis observes in today's (Friday) New York Times "when big studios turn much of the country's movie theaters into a dump." Freedomland is just the latest trash to be thrown into it, she suggests -- "an inept, lethally dull drama," starring Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post refers to the movie as a "dispiriting February botch." Joe Roth, the Revolution Studios president who directs this film, is primarily blamed for its shortcomings. Roth, says Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News, "tells this story with a clumsiness unworthy of the script." Likewise Ann Hornaday writes in the Washington Post, "Freedomland is that saddest of all things in the cinema, a great story poorly told." Claudia Puig in USA Today remarks that Roth ought to "stick to his day job" as head of Revolution. |
