Stand by Me

The entire cast is superb and it so perfectly paced, that the story unfolds with wit, pathos and sensitivity and completely free of emotional shortcuts. Read full review

Stand By Me is the summer's great gift, a compassionate, perfectly performed look at the real heart of youth. It stands, sweet and strong, ribald, outrageous and funny, like its heroes themselves--a bit gamy around the edges, perhaps, but pure and fine clear through. It's one of those treasures absolutely not to be missed. Read full review

Stand By Me is one of those films that stands up to the test of time. It may never top any critic’s “films of the century” list, like Citizen Kane, or Raging Bull, but it has a charm and depth that seems to resonate with each generation. Read full review

A small, quiet film that walks tall and resonates long after.

The resulting adventure – bizarre, mysterious and moving – is about lost youth and the recovery of innocence through writing and memory. It is also one of those vanishingly rare films where child actors have to carry almost the entire drama. Read full review

The Ben E King theme song and all the imagery of tousled adolescents preening themselves like miniature James Deans rekindle memories of old jeans commercials, but the film is so well-observed and so energetically acted by its young cast that mawkishness is kept at bay. Read full review

As directed by Rob Reiner, Stand by Me has a quality of seriousness, and of relaxation, that you hardly ever see in movies made about kids. It's at its best when its characters are just hanging out, razzing each other, feeling the summertime -- when it's like "Diner" for 12-year-olds. [22 Aug 1986, p.D1]

Most of the time these rowdy kids are refreshingly real...Stand By Me, like Wilson's film, owes some of its appeal to sheer nostalgia, an easy enough emotion to evoke. But there is more here as well: sweetness of spirit, and comedy that comes from a well-remembered vision of the way we were.[25 Aug 1986, p.63]

The richness of its tapestry, densely woven from human emotions and character interaction, ensure it will never lose that relevance. Read full review

Stand By Me is not "a masterpiece," but it is an evocative and cheerily amusing movie about growing up male in 1959, a kind of pre-pubescent American Graffiti, the locker-room rejoinder to My American Cousin. [8 Aug 1986, p.D1]

Rob Reiner’s film is all about the journey, not the destination. And all of his young actors are great — Wheaton as the sensitive narrator, Feldman as the slightly crazy wild card, and especially Phoenix as the tough-yet-tender doomed soul. Read full review

Stand By Me is a shuck. It trumpets its sensitivity while reveling in coarseness. And at its climax it suggests that manhood can be found through the barrel of a gun. Maybe this is how Rambo discovered puberty. Maybe real kids should be discouraged from following his example. Read full review

Stand by Me is easily one of the best Stephen King adaptations and one of the best coming-of-age stories ever made. Read full review

Scripters have written inspired dialog for this quartet of plucky boys at that hard-to-capture age when they’re still young enough to get scared and yet old enough to want to sneak smokes and cuss. Read full review

A sentimental film that works because of its unsentimental moments--in particular, its sometimes embarassingly honest portrayal of what interests boys and how they talk about it. Reiner elicits some excellent performances from his young cast (River Phoenix is a standout) and Kiefer Sutherland is memorable as a menacing teen hood. Read full review

A film of honorable ambitions severely compromised by a creeping show-biz phoniness. Read full review

It has the ring of small, unspectacular truths and a devotion to characters that is quite rare in contemporary film, and is genuinely the kind of movie "they" don't make anymore. This makes Stand by Me special. It does not make it a wonderful movie. [22 Aug 1986, p.D1]

There's another, more important reason why Stand By Me isn't for kids. Its perspective is that of a knowing adult, which is to say that though the film is frequently affectionate and funny, it contains a drop too much condescension to be entirely successful. Read full review

Without his comic underpinnings (there's only a crude pie-eating fantasy as comic security) Reiner seems lost in his own cinematic wilderness—button-down careful, almost afraid to move. His only storytelling strategy involves crosscutting from one talking head to another, and he leaves too many literary ends dangling from the Stephen King novella on which this 1989 film is based. Read full review

Rob Reiner's film, taken from Stephen King's autobiographical novella "The Body," overdoses on sincerity and nostalgia. Seeing it is like watching an extended Christmas special of "The Waltons" and "Little House on the Prairie" - it makes you feel virtuous. All that stays with you is the tale that Gordie, the central character, tells his friends around the campfire.

Some of their horsing around, 1950ish style, is comical, but too much of what they do is only too plainly imposed by the movie makers. Rob Reiner's direction hammers in every obvious element in an obvious script. Read full review