Fat Man and Little Boy

What Fat Man and Little Boy tells us is potent and essential. It tells us if history is dominated by individual action, then individual action has meaning -- in history everything is for keeps. Read full review

Joffe may remain as variable a filmmaker as ever, but this time, at least, he gives one something really solid to think about. Read full review

Joffe does a good job of making a complex project comprehensible to a mass audience with no memory of World War II. Moreover, he infuses drama into an often cerebral project by highlighting the tensions among the characters. [20 Oct 1989, p.E13]

Although the film ends with a facile, romantic comment by Oppenheimer, the unnerving momentum of all that has gone before will remain to haunt the imagination of the viewers. [20 Oct 1989, p.D2]

Whatever his film's contrivances as it builds, with this closing, Joffe has made a permanent contribution to our national insomnia. [20 Oct 1989, p.F1]

It's a handsome period piece and a decent character drama, and it has that Newman performance. But it never has enough bang for the buck, and that's too bad. [20 Oct 1989, p.G11]

Thanks to a disproportionately superior second hour, Fat Man and Little Boy improves on its historically valid, but commercially suicidal, title. It is not, however, even the screen's second best chronicle of atomic bomb development in wartime Los Alamos, N.M. [20 Oct 1989, p.4D]

Fat Man and Little Boy tries to cover too much territory by introducing corny romantic subplots involving Oppenheimer's mistress and a relationship between a young scientist (John Cusack) and a nurse (Laura Dern). These awkwardly written sequences remind us that we are watching a conventional movie and destroy any documentarylike reality. [20 Oct 1989, p.A]

It is a slick, well-made film, graced by the stirring performance of Paul Newman, but it offers little that is new about that crucial chapter in the world's history. [30 Oct 1989]