Bobby
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) | Release Date: November 17, 2006 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
54
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 31 Critic Reviews
Positive:
12
Mixed:
17
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
Why such a structurally scattered movie should hang together at all is a mystery. That it does more than that, that it works brilliantly, is a miracle, or at the very least the product of unquantifiable causes. Read full review
91
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
It's a sideways view of a national trauma. The large cast includes standout performances from such unlikelies as Demi Moore, playing an alcoholic crooner, and Estevez himself, as her long-suffering husband. Everyone in this film is powerful. Read full review
91
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam Arnold
For all its unevenness, Bobby is a powerful, poignant movie and its ending -- played over a long excerpt of one of RFK's most compassionate speeches, voiced with none of the cliches of political rhetoric -- was, for me, the movie year's single most devastating sequence. Read full review
83
Baltimore SunChris Kaltenbach
The film's impact and poignancy are undeniable. Read full review
75
PremiereScott Warren
Alll in all, however, Estevez has pulled together the best political drama, fiction or otherwise, in recent memory. Read full review
75
TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh
Though Estevez's achievement doesn't quite live up to his ambitions -- the climax of Altman's "Nashville" (1975) evokes the same brutal loss of innocence to more shattering effect -- it still contains enough powerful moments to balance the weaker sections. Read full review
70
VarietyDeborah Young
Emilio Estevez's Bobby is a passionate outcry for peace and justice in America that becomes deeply involving by the final climactic scene. Read full review
70
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
Bobby, even if it suffers from a few silly scenes, gets more right than it does wrong. Read full review
70
Chicago ReaderJonathan Rosenbaum
So keenly felt and so deeply imagined I couldn't help but be moved, even grateful for its bleeding-heart nostalgia. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleJosh Rosenblatt
The movie isn't about Kennedy; rather, Kennedy is the sun around which all the other planets of the film revolve. And like some epic Louis B. Mayer picture from the Thirties, Bobby has a thousand stars in its galaxy, some of them great (Fishburne, Rodríguez), some of them not (Wood, Hunt), and one of them brilliant (Hopkins). Read full review
63
USA TodayClaudia Puig
Despite its flaws, its intriguing premise leaves us haunted by thoughts of "What if?" Read full review
63
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
This is simply too vast a task for a filmmaker as inexperienced as Estevez. Compared with, say, Robert Altman's similar but far more complex "Nashville," Bobby mostly comes off as a Hollywood public service announcement: passionate, righteous and strikingly removed from reality. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterRay Bennett
Whether or not Bobby Kennedy was the man his supporters believed him to be, the film makes a persuasive case that something important in America was silenced when he was gunned down. Read full review
60
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
When you hear his (Robert Kennedy's) patient, meditative speeches, from which every note of demagoguery or pandering has been purged, you glimpse the film Mr. Estevez set out to make -- the one you may wish you were watching. Read full review
60
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
Despite the clunkiness, Estevez's commitment to his father's generation’s idealism (and its murder) commands respect. Read full review
60
EmpireAngie Errigo
A remarkable ensemble in an uneven patchwork of loss, longing and the urgent necessity of a societal rethink. Read full review
58
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
Bobby coasts along on a dread, and sorrow, it doesn't earn. Read full review
58
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
For all its flaws, though, Bobby is still moving. Not so much with its indifferent characters, but rather with the overall mood of a common hope crushed into shapeless grief. That painful historical moment is worth revisiting, as is the image of the man whose death occasioned it. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
The resulting finished project is a series of skits performed by famous people doing favors for a friend, and it works about as well as one might expect from such an endeavor. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubKeith Phipps
The film has virtually nothing to say about the man, or about much of anything, really. It's a sketchbook trying to pass as a tapestry. Read full review
50
SalonStephanie Zacharek
Just when you think you've got a handle on the central characters in Bobby, yet more of them appear: The thing is a little like the stateroom scene in "A Night at the Opera." Read full review
50
The New YorkerDavid Denby
Estevez has made a vague gesture at a large, metaphoric structure without having the dramatic means to achieve it. His choreography of the panic and misery in the hotel after the shooting is impressive, and some of the actors do fine in their brief roles. But his script never rises above earnest banality, and we are constantly being taught little lessons in tolerance and humanity: Read full review
50
NewsweekDavid Ansen
You don't have to have lived through the period to find this wrenching. And you don't have to doubt Estevez's sincerity to find it emotionally opportunistic. Read full review
50
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
Bobby has its heart in the right place (on its sleeve). But it doesn't have its screenplay anywhere - or at least, anywhere near the heft that its subject demands. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam Lacey
Fascinating, even when it's fascinatingly bad. Read full review
40
Village VoiceJim Ridley
Bobby can be seen clearly for what it is--an "Airport" movie with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as the central calamity and an all-star cast deployed like multiple George Kennedys. Read full review
40
L.A. WeeklyScott Foundas
The only character who emerges as more than an ideological mouthpiece, and nearly saves the movie, is the Ambassador's resident hairstylist, who masks her faded beauty with a thick coat of eye shadow and an overteased hairdo. I kept wondering who this deeply sad, earthy actress was, making so much out of so little, until I realized it was Sharon Stone in the most naked performance she's ever given without taking her clothes off. Read full review
40
Los Angeles TimesKevin Crust
It's an ambitious film drenched in sincerity and oozing with nostalgia that, despite the energy provided by its title icon via archival footage, falls flat dramatically in nearly every other way. Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
Tests your patience to the breaking point -- maybe beyond.
25
New York PostLou Lumenick
One of the year's worst movies. Read full review
25
Rolling StonePeter Travers
Estevez means well. But having your heart in the right place is no excuse for insipid ineptitude. Read full review
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