Taking Woodstock
Focus Features | Release Date: August 26, 2009 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
55
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 35 Critic Reviews
Positive:
17
Mixed:
17
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Taking Woodstock has the freshness of something being created, not remembered. Read full review
75
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe Williams
Taiwanese director Ang Lee sees the '60s through a rose-colored telephoto lens, but his sympathetic spirit extends the generous message of the hippie era like a passed joint. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
This is very light material, and, unusually for a Lee picture, not everybody in the ensemble appears to be acting in the same universe, let alone the same story. On the other hand: It’s fun. Read full review
75
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
Ang Lee adds to the mythology with the sweet, gentle Taking Woodstock. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie Rickey
Lee distills the flavor of this transforming event and hints at how it transformed some who were there. His movie is a contact high. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
If you've ever wondered what it would be like to be there - to actually be there, man - this movie gets it. Read full review
75
Baltimore SunChris Kaltenbach
A love letter to the time, and the period, and the legend that has grown around both. Maybe it's all too wonderful to be true, but that's OK. If Taking Woodstock is a fantasy, then it's a most benevolent one, and more power to it. Read full review
75
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike Scott
Lee keeps things afloat with an appealing air of levity, including a fun but restrained use of split-screen, an homage to the 1970 doc, as well as cameos by that movie's Port-O-San guy and its peace-sign-flashing nuns. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
It's a low-wattage film about a high-wattage event. Which is somewhat disappointing, though you do get a thoughtful, playful, often amusing film about what happened backstage at one of the '60s' great happenings. Read full review
70
The New York TimesStephen Holden
This likable, humane movie is not an attempt to recreate the epochal Woodstock Music and Art Fair captured in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary “Woodstock.” It is essentially a small, intimate film into which is fitted a peripheral view of the landmark event. Read full review
67
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
Lee captures the fractious, joyful, monstrously evolving mass it all was. Read full review
67
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
Somehow Lee fails to make it speak to us. His heart is in the right place, but like many of the crowd that swarmed Yasgur's farm, he has rather lost his head. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
Lee has always had an affinity for innocence and an abiding affection for outcasts, and both traits serve him well in Taking Woodstock -- but only up to a point. Beyond that point, where sanctification meets reality, the film floats up, up, and away. Read full review
63
USA TodayClaudia Puig
This is Woodstock from another perspective -- one without Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
The movie hits its stride when it deals directly with the concert. The more peripheral Elliot is to the story, the better things become. Read full review
63
Rolling StonePeter Travers
The film's major sin of omission: the music. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
This is as safe and sweet a movie as you could make about America’s sex-drugs-and-rock ’n’ roll-est event. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsJoe Neumaier
Something of a traffic jam--even with his usual restraint, Lee couldn't recount a key moment of the '60s without a blurry parade of personalities--and also lullingly dull. Read full review
60
EmpirePhilip Wilding
One man’s near-emotionless trip through an event that was the high watermark for US counterculture moves along without any real sense of purpose or pace. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubKeith Phipps
Lee’s movie is pleasant enough, but it’s too swept up in the spirit it’s celebrating to ask the relevant questions. Read full review
50
The New YorkerAnthony Lane
You can’t deny the smiling mood that wafts through the film like incense, and to that extent it honors the original three days; but not once does a character’s show of feeling stir you, send you, or stop you in your tracks, and the loss is unsustainable. Read full review
50
VarietyTodd McCarthy
The picture serves up intermittent pleasures but is too raggedy and laid-back for its own good, its images evaporating nearly as soon as they hit the screen. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesBetsy Sharkey
It's a frustrating complication of a movie with a sprawling story and grand ambitions -- and some truly grand acting -- that stumbles almost as often as it soars. Bummer. Read full review
50
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
Awfully amiable and dull. Instead of honoring musical gods, the film seems to think Pat Boone was headlining. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
Ultimately, even Lee appears to lose interest, flashing none of his usual visual panache and, at the end, content to forego any considered conclusion for a hunk of lumpy irony. Read full review
50
NPRScott Tobias
Taking Woodstock has a winning generosity of spirit, but even that serves chiefly to underline the film's curious inconsequentiality, as if it were a two-hour pilot for a show about a charmingly eccentric family and a rotating cast of colorful guest stars. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoanne Kaufman
The gentle, ambling Ang Lee comedy that's a few tokes short of groovy. Read full review
50
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
A choppy and occasionally unsure film, one that doesn't achieve the superb tonal control of "The Ice Storm," but that certainly doesn't represent an unqualified disaster on a par with Lee's first attempt at the western, "Ride With the Devil." Read full review
50
SalonStephanie Zacharek
So gentle it barely has enough vitality to stick to the screen. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarjorie Baumgarten
Elliot’s coming-out story is mostly shunted into the film’s latter half, and when it does emerge it is woefully conventional and diluted by other goings-on. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderAndrea Gronvall
The screenplay is sharp and insightful, the period details ring true, and Martin is appealing as a dreamer conflicted about his homosexuality. But once the action shifts from the town to the festival, any momentum gets lost in a psychedelic haze. Read full review
40
Village VoiceMelissa Anderson
Little music from the concert itself is heard. On display instead are inane, occasionally borderline offensive portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares, and freaks. Read full review
40
Time OutKeith Uhlich
Lee and Schamus make history blandly palatable; in the process, they rob the times and the people they’re portraying of their complications. Read full review
40
SlateDana Stevens
No one's asking for a song-by-song re-enactment of the concert, but Lee's refusal to focus even for a moment on the musical aspect of the festival starts to feel almost perverse, as if he's deliberately frustrating the audience's desire. Read full review
38
New York PostLou Lumenick
Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock achieves an amazing feat: It turns the fabled music festival, a key cultural moment of the late 20th century, into an exceedingly lame, heavily clichéd, thumb-sucking bore. Read full review
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