| Focus Features | Release Date: November 1, 2019 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
30
Mixed:
10
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Nov 2, 2019
With enough terror to satisfy modern audiences and enough underplayed plot movement to save it from conventional biopic trajectory, Harriet holds interest and invites respect. It is still not the great Civil War epic it could have been, but it’s solid enough to work, and Cynthia Erivo’s valiant and committed performance is a wonderful achievement.
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Oct 31, 2019
At times, it feels more like an elevated made-for-television movie. In spite of this, the film is affecting and moving. The formidable British actress Cynthia Erivo does great work here. The script doesn’t give her much range, but Erivo gives us a woman whose determination and humanity shines, presenting a hero for her age… and ours.
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Oct 31, 2019
Lemmons – who has directed some splendid pictures over the years, among them "Eve’s Bayou" and "The Caveman’s Valentine" – is fully alive to both the danger and beauty of the landscape of the American South – even the shape of a tree, craggy and twisted or lush with leaves, could be either a warning or a welcome. Erivo shines through it all, giving us a glimpse into the mind of a steadfast woman of purpose.
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Oct 30, 2019
In work that emphasizes the unstoppable power of a persuasive performance, Erivo not only convincingly conveys the strength of the celebrated abolitionist’s fierce personality, she creates her as a realistic, multi-sided character, a complex woman of formidable self-belief and not any kind of plaster saint.
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Oct 30, 2019
Like a classroom history lesson, the script by director Lemmons and Gregory Allen Howard dutifully recounts the life of this extraordinary person. The movie feels prosaic, although Tubman’s occasional intonation of a timeless spiritual in lieu of dialogue is an unexpected lyrical touch enhanced by the purity of Erivo’s voice.
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Oct 30, 2019
Oct 30, 2019
Peppered with tense action sequences and propelled by a characteristically gorgeous musical score by Terence Blanchard, Harriet is the kind of instructional, no-nonsense biopic that may not take many artistic risks or sophisticated stylistic departures but manages to benefit from that lack of pretension.
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The Film StageSep 14, 2019
Drawing from Tubman’s devout belief and history of seizures and visions, the film makes much of her visions, divine interventions which seem to appear anytime it’s dramatically convenient, alerting her to danger with considerable specificity. This magical-thinking approach to religion is a dramatic crutch for a film that maintains a hindsight perspective on Tubman, leaving a lot of blanks in its historical account and delegating much of Tubman and the Underground Railroad’s process and organization to supporting characters to handle offscreen.
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Sep 13, 2019
It doesn’t have the polish or prestige of your typical Oscar movie ... But there’s a tension at work in Harriet that’s missing from other, “better” movies. ... It’s also a vaster and in many ways wilder film than it will get credit for, a movie that leans into the excitement of Tubman’s mission so energetically it almost morphs into a heist picture, dredging up odd romantic and religious energies along the way.
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Sep 11, 2019The GuardianSep 11, 2019
The result falls somewhere between a slave-escape drama, an action thriller, a western and even an unexpected kind of superhero film. It’s a winning combination, although Lemmons does not immerse us in the agony and injustice of slavery as such; she puts together a well-crafted movie that is the showcase for an excellent performance from Erivo.
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Sep 11, 2019
Harriet is a conscientiously uplifting, devoted, rock-solid version of her story. Yet when it comes to putting the audience in touch with what’s extraordinary about Harriet Tubman — not just illustrating what she did but letting us connect with that quest, and with her, on a moment-to-moment level — Harriet is a conventional and rather prosaic piece of filmmaking.
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