 Virtually every critic is remarking in reviews of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center that this is not your typical Oliver Stone movie. No conspiracies. No politics. No anger. No controversy. Indeed, writes Amy Biancolli in the Houston Chronicle, "Oliver Stone has made a film that is unrecognizable as an Oliver Stone film. Beyond a manifest passion for the material, nothing about World Trade Center suggests Stone is its director." Likewise, Phillip Wuntch observes in the Dallas Morning News, "Stone keeps reins on his own political agenda and directs what's possibly his only film that will play comfortably in the reputed heartland." Nevertheless, A.O. Scott in the New York Times argues that Stone may have been the ideal director for this project. "There is really no other American director who can move so swiftly and emphatically from intimate to epic scale, saturating even quiet moments with fierce emotion. He edits like a maestro conducting Beethoven, coaxing images and sequences into a state of agitated eloquence," Scott writes. Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer describes the film as "stunning in its simplicity and aching details" that "honestly and honorably earns its emotions." The film also has some significant detractors. Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times writes that it jibes with "the business-as-usual norms of sentimental studio moviemaking" and thereby winds up feeling "forced, manufactured and largely -- but not entirely -- unconvincing." And Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal comments that the movie "manages to give truth the ring of hackneyed fiction." |
