Paramount Pictures | Release Date: October 20, 1989 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
50
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 24 Critic Reviews
Positive:
9
Mixed:
11
Negative:
4
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75
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]
75
San Francisco ChronicleJudy Stone
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]
70
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]
63
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]
63
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]
63
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]
63
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]