Jobs
Open Road Films | Release Date: August 16, 2013 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
44
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 35 Critic Reviews
Positive:
5
Mixed:
24
Negative:
6
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
80
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierAug 15, 2013
Entertaining and smart, with a great, career 2.0 performance from Ashton Kutcher. Read full review
75
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanAug 15, 2013
The ironic thrust of the movie is that Jobs' humanity is there in that perfectionistic insanity. He pushes and pushes to make home computers more and more appealing, accessible, and user-friendly, and that's his great gift to the world. Read full review
63
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperAug 15, 2013
It’s a competently made, traditional biopic about a man who disdained those terms. Read full review
63
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaAug 15, 2013
Jobs is a just-the-facts - and fiddling-with-the-facts - dramatization, forgoing any kind of deeper psychological exploration of the man and his motivations, his demons and dreams. Read full review
63
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreAug 13, 2013
It’s superficial, but that plays into the hands of the film’s star, Ashton Kutcher. Read full review
60
Village VoiceStephanie ZacharekAug 20, 2013
Kutcher finds compassion without going for anything so cheap as an explanation for Jobs's bad behavior; it's a wily, understated performance. Read full review
60
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriAug 19, 2013
The problem is that the film gets too wrapped up in the myth to tell an effective behind-the-scenes tale. Read full review
60
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottAug 16, 2013
He was a charismatic leader and the greatest salesman the industry ever saw. He also was a very vocal spokesman for the graying counterculture -- crediting his high-tech success to Zen Buddhism, Dylan songs and acid trips. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterJustin LoweMar 18, 2013
The filmmakers do fall into the trap of overly sentimentalizing a widely beloved public figure who represents an enormous cultural significance. At the same time, however, they keep the movie frequently engaging. Read full review
58
IndieWireEric KohnMar 18, 2013
The movie is constantly at war with attempts to provide an honest portrayal, almost as if its subject were reaching beyond the grave to steer any negativity back in the direction of a hagiography. Read full review
55
NPRMark JenkinsAug 16, 2013
So the principal point of controversy involved here is not Jobs himself, but Ashton Kutcher, who plays him. The actor's approach is to ape Jobs' speech and movements, which he does quite well. Whether mimicry qualifies as characterization is a question for Jobs' viewers to answer for themselves. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliAug 16, 2013
"Compelling" is a word one could apply to Jobs - he was a magnetic figure - but it doesn't describe this movie. "Average" might even be a stretch, and that's something of an insult to the man whose story it tells. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comSusan WloszczynaAug 16, 2013
Save for a few references of being abandoned by his birth parents and adopted later, the source of Jobs's jerky behavior never is revealed. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyAug 15, 2013
If Jobs had been a producer on Jobs, he would have sent it back to the lab for a redesign. Read full review
50
Boston GlobePeter KeoughAug 15, 2013
If one were to compare this film to one of Jobs’s own products, it would be more like the Cube than the iPod. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleAug 15, 2013
At its best, it's a good picture, and at its worst, it's almost good. Read full review
50
TimeMary PolsAug 15, 2013
Kutcher, whose acting chops haven’t been tested in all those pretty-boy lead roles, was a welcome surprise. His movie-star glow distracts, but there is a strong physical resemblance. Moreover, he’s got many of Jobs’ mannerisms down cold, from that T Rex–like walk to the fingers that fan the air and the yoga-style postures left over from his bohemian youth. It’s a good impression, but Jobs itself is all too impressionistic. Read full review
50
USA TodayClaudia PuigAug 15, 2013
One thing it doesn't do is offer a revealing look at the mercurial entrepreneur. The movie that bears his name settles on a blandly superficial treatment of a deeply complex man. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter TraversAug 15, 2013
Jobs is a one-man show that needed to go for broke and doesn't. My guess is that Jobs would give it a swat. Read full review
50
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezAug 15, 2013
Jobs works much better as a history of Apple than it does as a portrait of the genius who dreamed it up. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsAug 15, 2013
The dialogue comes straight out of "The Benny Goodman Story." That look, someone says to a staring, pausing Kutcher, "tells me you're on to something big." Nobody talks in this movie; everyone speechifies or take turns sloganing one another to death. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubKyle RyanAug 14, 2013
For (nearly) every yin of Ashton Kutcher’s Steve Jobs flashing a moment of brilliance, there’s a yang of someone saying he’s changed or is his own worst enemy. The unwritten, but understood, full title of Joshua Michael Stern’s film is "Jobs: Brilliant Asshole." Read full review
50
Arizona RepublicKerry LengelAug 14, 2013
If it weren’t for his voice, Kutcher would have been the ideal choice to star in Jobs, a well-meant but ultimately unsurprising biopic. Read full review
50
VarietyJustin ChangMar 18, 2013
Ultimately, Jobs is a prosaic but not unaffecting tribute to the virtues of defiance, nonconformity, artistry, beauty, craftsmanship, imagination and innovation, qualities it only intermittently reflects as a piece of filmmaking. Read full review
42
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallAug 15, 2013
Jobs the movie isn't as fascinating as Jobs the man, much less the myth of entrepreneurial superiority he left behind. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovAug 21, 2013
It fails to rise above the inherent limitations of the traditional Hollywood biopic and it's about as insanely great as a Mac "low cost" LC model – which was, to be fair, pretty cool. Read full review
40
Time OutDavid FearAug 15, 2013
The film thankfully doesn’t offer some pop-psychology Rosebud to explain Jobs’s drive or near-sociopathic perfectionism, yet we walk away knowing nothing about what made this revolutionary tick. Read full review
40
The DissolveNathan RabinAug 15, 2013
It’s bloated, overwrought, and nakedly sentimental, a sappy and cliched celebration instead of a searching and incisive exploration. Read full review
40
The GuardianEd GibbsMar 18, 2013
This is far from the bomb some would have envisaged, but neither is it the character illumination one would wish for. Jobs appears so consumed by his work here that little else mattered in his life. That may be true, but we're left none the wiser as to what made the man tick, beyond what we already know. Read full review
38
New York PostLou LumenickAug 15, 2013
Jobs amounts to, at best, a Cliffs Notes version of the man’s early life. If you want the real story, you’ll have to read Walter Isaacson’s fascinating 2011 biography, which would make a much better film than this one. Read full review
37
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanAug 15, 2013
The film is so thick with Jobs’s career highlights and lowlights that there’s little room for insights. Read full review
30
The New York TimesManohla DargisAug 15, 2013
The Great Man theory of history that’s recycled in this movie is inevitably unsatisfying, but never more so when the figure at the center remains as opaque as Jobs does here. Read full review
30
Los Angeles TimesMark OlsenAug 14, 2013
There was a time when the slack storytelling, stock characterizations and general by-the-numbers feeling of the film could be put into perspective by saying it seemed like a TV biopic. But even TV movies are done with more verve than this these days. Read full review
20
The TelegraphSebastian DoggartAug 3, 2013
Where the film completely falls down is in director Joshua Michael Stern’s disastrous decision to cast Ashton Kutcher in the central role. Read full review
0
Slant MagazineR. Kurt OsenlundAug 12, 2013
Steered by a lead actor and director, Joshua Michael Stern, who are both way out of their respective leagues, Jobs is excruciating, failing to entertain and all but pissing on its subject's grave. Read full review
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