The Front Runner
Columbia Pictures Corporation | Release Date: November 6, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
61
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 44 Critic Reviews
Positive:
22
Mixed:
21
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
ObserverRex ReedNov 9, 2018
Brilliantly directed by Jason Reitman, from an intelligent, carefully researched and fast moving screenplay by Reitman, Jay Carson and Matt Bai (based on Bai’s marvelous book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid), this enthralling film is a mirror to the shifting relationship between the media and politics, and the events that changed the last 30 years in American history. Read full review
100
Film ThreatAndy HowellSep 10, 2018
Every line of dialog, every camera angle, every beat is precisely engineered. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperNov 19, 2018
The Front Runner doesn’t hit us over the head with parallels to today’s political and media world. It doesn’t have to. Read full review
88
The Associated PressMark KennedyNov 8, 2018
The Front Runner is appropriately paced like a thriller, as everyone involved gets pulled down into the drain, helplessly. Read full review
88
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiNov 6, 2018
Jackman’s turn doesn’t have an Oscars wow quality; nor does the movie itself. The script’s zingers can occasionally come off as store-brand “West Wing.” But it’s a fun, endlessly fascinating watch in which the big questions outweigh the tiny problem. Read full review
83
The PlaylistGregory EllwoodSep 1, 2018
Yes, Jackman’s impressive portrayal of Hart is at the center of “The Front Runner” (it’s one of the best performances of his career), but Reitman uses a large cast of characters to give depth to the events in question. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeJan 14, 2019
There’s a thrilling charge to the film-making. Jostling, overlapping dialogue feels lived rather than written. Read full review
80
EmpireDan JolinJan 7, 2019
A sharp-witted and wide-reaching account of a bright political hope’s fall from grace, with an impressive ensemble cast and a great performance from Jackman. Read full review
80
L.A. WeeklyBilge EbiriNov 8, 2018
It makes for an intriguing combination of tones and rhythms — urgency running up against paralysis — that speaks to the twisted dynamism of our political process, then and now. Read full review
80
Film Journal InternationalStephen Whitty Nov 6, 2018
The Front Runner works hard to accommodate all points of view. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranNov 6, 2018
Despite the potential for rancorous finger-pointing, one of the remarkable things about “The Front Runner” is its determination to be even-handed, to encourage viewers to make up their own minds (at least up to a point) about what happened 30 years ago and what it means for today. Read full review
80
Screen DailyAllan HunterSep 8, 2018
The Front Runner may cover a lot of ground and raise more questions about morality and the media than it can ever answer, but it remains a punchy, absorbing political drama. Read full review
80
The GuardianBenjamin LeeSep 8, 2018
There’s an authenticity underpinning the portrayal of events in The Front Runner that lifts it above the less-than-groundbreaking set-up. Read full review
75
Philadelphia Daily NewsGary ThompsonNov 19, 2018
As played by Jackman, he's imperious, self-righteous, and humorless, and it's hard to imagine such a figure capturing the imagination of the public, policy acumen notwithstanding. The movie is better at showing Rice (Sara Paxton) as a woman trampled by the press stampede — ditto Hart's wife Lee, played elegantly by Farmiga. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayNov 14, 2018
Most confoundingly, it sheds no light on Hart himself: a man who steadfastly insisted on maintaining his privacy, whose impressive intellect was couched within an aloof, withholding persona, remains a cipher, the missing core of a movie that’s nominally about him, but can’t seem to get a bead on its own protagonist. Read full review
75
IGNRafael MotamayorSep 14, 2018
The Front Runner is too afraid to take a side in its central debate, but a strong ensemble cast and interesting ideas about accountability and newsworthiness make this a timely and thought-provoking film. Read full review
75
The Film StageJared MobarakSep 9, 2018
Reitman and company let actions do the talking for a good two-thirds of the runtime and it’s a true joy to experience. The actors have brilliant comic timing with one another and everyone feels as though they’ve been on the road to cultivate relationships built on respect. Read full review
70
TimeStephanie ZacharekNov 1, 2018
Astute and painfully relevant political comedy. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenNov 20, 2018
The Front Runner spends too much time involved in the glare of the situation rather than examining its intricacies or characters. Like many of Reitman’s films, particularly Men, Women & Children, The Front Runner is interested in the subject of privacy as mitigated by the TMI era. The character of Gary Hart, unfortunately, becomes only a means to this end. Read full review
63
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldNov 29, 2018
Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner is so crowded with characters and overlapping conversations and crammed-full rooms that it’s easy to miss the quiet at its center: the enigma that is Gary Hart. Read full review
63
Movie NationRoger MooreNov 23, 2018
Here, he’s made a good (not great) movie that’s not captured the interest of audiences or reviewers. Sure, he didn’t realize his “hero” was just one of its villains. And The Front Runner may not achieve its overreaching ambitions. But that’s appropriate, too. Neither did Gary Hart. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliNov 18, 2018
The Front Runner is a less a film for general movie-goers than for political junkies. Read full review
60
The TelegraphRobbie CollinJan 10, 2019
As cautionary tales go, The Front Runner is of an unusually cautious bent. It presents the evidence, then sits back and folds its arms. Read full review
60
Vanity FairRichard LawsonDec 16, 2018
In this grim reality, The Front Runner feels quaint, almost a hopeful thing, crafted in the old ways with a pitiable naïveté. Read full review
60
Time OutJoshua RothkopfNov 9, 2018
There’s a whiff of inconsequence to Reitman’s take, fizzy and watchable though it is. It should be about the stealth weaponization of outrage (and of women)—a tragedy that’s leagues more sophisticated that this. Read full review
60
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinNov 9, 2018
The best thing about the film The Front Runner is that it gives Gary Hart, the Colorado senator and 1984 and ’88 presidential candidate, a measure of dignity, and today’s audiences a historical context in which to view his missteps. Read full review
60
TheWrapRobert AbeleNov 6, 2018
Perhaps because in giving the jump-around view — introducing us to not just Hart (Jackman) and family, but campaign staff, and reporters from a handful of newspapers — the effect is of a scandal skimmed, rather than explored. Read full review
60
Rolling StonePeter TraversNov 5, 2018
Not even Jackman, one of the most persuasive actors around, can sell the argument that personal weakness doesn’t stain public character in the era of #MeToo. Read full review
60
VarietyPeter DebrugeSep 3, 2018
Hugh Jackman proves an inspired candidate to embody Hart, downplaying his brawny movie-star persona, while still conveying the twinkle-eyed sex appeal that was not only Hart’s undoing, but one of the qualities that would have made the photogenic and well-spoken senator from Colorado a logical choice to follow the country’s first movie-star president. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterStephen FarberSep 1, 2018
The film never quite clarifies its own attitude toward Hart. It simply doesn’t spend enough time with him to allow the audience to decide whether he was a truly transformative politician undone by tabloid reporters or just another slick operator. This robs the film of a tragic dimension that it might have achieved. Read full review
58
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerNov 9, 2018
Jackman, sporting a distracting, Hart-like brown hairpiece, seems miscast. He doesn’t convincingly convey this politician’s swagger and slickness, and Reitman’s attempts to mimic a loose-limbed political movie in the style of, say, Robert Altman’s “Tanner '88” series or “The Candidate” are rather leaden. It’s a film that’s less interesting to watch than to discuss afterward. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleNov 14, 2018
A near-miss, but a miss all the same. Read full review
50
The AtlanticDavid SimsNov 9, 2018
So much of The Front Runner feels like stenography, giving audiences the basics and then letting Hart or Bradlee monologue to the camera about how the norms of yesteryear are slipping away, perhaps forever. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternNov 8, 2018
The production’s shrill insistence on scandal-mongering as the poison of our political process is trivializing, too. Given the profound currents and countercurrents that have transformed — and menaced — the news media in the last few years, this story plays like quaintly ancient history. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comChristy LemireNov 6, 2018
Reitman gets the superficial details of the era right: the pay phones, the big sweaters, the constant indoor smoking. But he’s missing both key insight and satirical bite in his depiction of this pivotal point in American history. Privacy is about to become a thing of the past. In The Front Runner, it dies with a whimper. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloNov 6, 2018
It’s a feature-length whine of frustrated entitlement. A movie less suited to its cultural moment would be hard to imagine. Read full review
50
The New YorkerAnthony LaneNov 5, 2018
Given the upheavals of the past two years, along the fault line between electoral and sexual politics, Reitman could have told the sorry saga from Rice’s point of view — her brush with fame, and her demonization as a temptress, or worse, at the hands of the media. Why must the fall of man, rather than the survival of woman, still be the main event? Can’t we have the business without the monkeys? Read full review
50
USA TodayBrian TruittNov 2, 2018
You’ve heard of an October surprise. This is a November disappointment. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzSep 12, 2018
This Altman-esque drama about the rise and fast fall of the 1988 presidential hopeful has a lot on its mind – morality in public office, the state of journalism, the often paradoxical nature of running a campaign based on lies – but spends too little energy dissecting those thoughts. Read full review
50
IndieWireDavid EhrlichSep 1, 2018
In Reitman’s hands — which are confident and clumsy in equal measure — these hefty matters play out as a mordant political comedy that tries to split the difference between “Veep” and “All the President’s Men.” That’s a tough needle to thread, and it doesn’t take long before “The Front Runner” throws in the towel on that idea. Read full review
42
ConsequenceDominick Suzanne-MayerNov 15, 2018
The Front Runner is a naively misguided product of panicked, desperate modern times. But perhaps even worse, at least for the type of film it wants to be, it lands somewhere between irrelevant and a woeful misreading of the room. Read full review
40
The GuardianPeter BradshawJan 14, 2019
The camera roams this way and that in the media scrum, and as in subsequent scenes, the dialogue is overlapping and borderline unintelligible. It is bravura work in its way, but unconnected to any real dramatic energy or political point. Read full review
40
The New York TimesA.O. ScottNov 6, 2018
Reitman uses Altmanesque sound design and serpentine camera movements to convey the chaos and kineticism of a process in constant, frantic motion. But after a while, once we’ve met the principal players, the speechmaking starts and a potential comedy of political manners turns into a pious, tendentious morality play. Read full review
38
Slant MagazineDerek SmithNov 7, 2018
The film quickly reveals that the only angle it’s interested in is the one that most sympathizes with Gary Hart. Read full review
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