The Glass Castle
Lionsgate | Release Date: August 11, 2017 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
56
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 40 Critic Reviews
Positive:
14
Mixed:
26
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
90
New York Daily NewsAriel ScottiAug 9, 2017
The Glass Castle is a family portrait that at its heart is a father-daughter movie, anchored by two outstanding actors. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonAug 10, 2017
A well-crafted drama about the comforts and insecurities of family life. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranAug 10, 2017
Though he is on less certain ground during the narrative's moments of warmth than when things are grim, director Cretton manages it all successfully. With Woody Harrelson as its dependable lodestar, "The Glass Castle" never loses its sense of direction or its belief in where it’s going. Read full review
80
Time OutTomris LafflyAug 6, 2017
The richly built The Glass Castle—splendidly attentive to the details of the Walls's eclectic childhood home and elevated by Ella Anderson's performance as a young Jeannette—is on the overlong side, but it does right by a tough true story that begs neither contempt nor pity. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesAug 9, 2017
The film’s third-act reach for a redemptive arc plays hollowly, and Harrelson teeters over the line into hillbilly affectation. Still, it’s not enough to erase the memory of Harrelson’s subtler moments, or to ruin what is an altogether worthy adaptation. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleAug 9, 2017
Still the spectacle of this, of beautiful, sensitive children at the mercy of damaged adults — this is what we take from The Glass Castle. It’s a universal awfulness rendered with truth and detail, and somehow that’s enough. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBarbara VanDenburghAug 10, 2017
For every crisis there’s a line of homespun wisdom, in every failure a universal lesson to impart. The film highlights each symbol, making explicit that which would be stronger left implicit, until Rex’s glass castle becomes an overbearing metaphor. Read full review
70
SalonMax CeaAug 10, 2017
Cretton did fictionalize parts of the story, adding dramatic embellishments and narrative tissue. But his greatest feat may have been telling the story in such a way that viewer doesn’t leave the theater going, “Oh, some of these stories are so extreme, they might be slight fictionalization.” They’re too consumed by the ride. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterSheri LindenAug 6, 2017
Even while gesturing toward a redemptive sacred altar, a default mode for parenthood in many mainstream movies, the director lets the messy realities stand. And his fine cast makes them ring true — the selfishness and neglect, the confrontations brutal and tender, the pained silences and, not least, the gusts of pure, jagged joy. Read full review
67
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallAug 10, 2017
The Glass Castle meanders toward its uplift ending, needing a few more of Cretton's clever time-jump edits, less rehashing the same personal failures. Not a bad movie at all, at times something more but seldom what it could be. Read full review
67
IndieWireEric KohnAug 6, 2017
Even when the the music swells and people talk through their problems to reach unremarkable conclusions, there’s an undercurrent of emotional authenticity. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliAug 13, 2017
By laminating Walls’ story with a Hollywood sheen, the narrative climaxes in an artificial and contrived manner. The penultimate scene is so obviously scripted that its inclusion is damaging. That’s too bad, because there are some effective individual scenes earlier in the proceedings. Read full review
63
Washington PostStephanie MerryAug 10, 2017
The movie often undercuts itself by spelling things out rather than hinting at them, belaboring emotions and ideas to ensure that the audience understands what the characters are feeling and thinking. Read full review
63
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldAug 9, 2017
Filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton (“Short Term 12”) can’t quite find that magical balance that Walls hits, and tilts the story too far toward sentiment. Read full review
60
EmpireIan FreerOct 2, 2017
A familiar tale of a quirky childhood is delivered with little in the way of freshness or truth. Still, the performances by Larson, Harrelson and Watts rescue it. Read full review
60
The New York TimesA.O. ScottAug 10, 2017
It’s both too tidy and too messy, and at the same time neither quite wild nor quite sensible enough. Read full review
60
Village VoiceAlan ScherstuhlAug 9, 2017
Destin Daniel Cretton’s adaptation of Walls’s book of the same name just often enough bursts to raucous life. Read full review
60
Screen DailyJohn HazeltonAug 6, 2017
Brie Larson and Destin Daniel Cretton, star and director, respectively, of 2013 festival favourite Short Term 12, re-team for the affecting, if less intense and occasionally meandering drama of The Glass Castle. Read full review
60
VarietyPeter DebrugeAug 6, 2017
Cretton captures the incidents of Walls’ childhood (too many of them, to be honest, as the film really ought to be half an hour shorter), but struggles to connect them to the grown woman Larson plays in the present. Read full review
59
Paste MagazineWill LeitchAug 10, 2017
The Glass Castle is a two-hour fight between a messy, sad, angry real-life family story and a Hollywood movie that keeps trying to soften all the edges and turn the tale into something “inspirational.” Read full review
58
Entertainment WeeklyJoe McGovernAug 10, 2017
Too much of the plot is spun with vanilla, especially tacked-on scenes of Walls’ starched careerist life in New York City with her Banker Boyfriend (Max Greenfield), presumably to engineer more screen time for the lead actress. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubKatie RifeAug 9, 2017
While it’s understandable that Walls might not want to linger on the more grim aspects of her childhood, Cretton’s decision to pull punches on those exact moments takes what could be a powerful tale of resilience and forgiveness and spins it into just another piece of Hollywood feel-good fluff. Read full review
50
ObserverThelma AdamsAug 15, 2017
There are heart-tugging moments in The Glass Castle, but Walls’s bestselling memoir needed to be roughed up and aired out. For it to match up to the book, the movie needed the glass to be smashed, not every shard treasured. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comChristy LemireAug 11, 2017
The Glass Castle is at odds with itself. Maybe that contradiction is by design. Maybe it’s inevitable, given the emotionally complicated terrain it treads. But the result is a film that never quite clicks tonally and doesn’t do justice to its harrowing central story. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreAug 11, 2017
A lumbering ordeal of a picture. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorAug 10, 2017
The fault in the film lies as much with Cretton’s script, which he co-wrote with Andrew Lanham, as it does with his direction. Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperAug 10, 2017
It’s a well-made film with strong performances, and it by no means shies away from some of the more shocking and tragic episodes from Jeannette’s upbringing. But when “The Glass Castle” reaches for late-movie moments of closure and self-revelations and forgiveness...it rings sour and false. Read full review
50
VoxAlissa WilkinsonAug 10, 2017
For most of the movie’s runtime, it seems like a story about coming to grips with your complicated feelings about the past, but by the end, some of the complexity seems to have evaporated. Read full review
50
The Film StageJose SolísAug 10, 2017
Destin Daniel Cretton’s adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle is more affected than affecting. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineJake ColeAug 10, 2017
As in Destin Daniel Cretton’s previous feature, Short Term 12, the oscillations between sociological horror and misty-eyed sentimentality call attention to how meticulously the film arranges its emotional punches. Read full review
50
New York PostSara StewartAug 10, 2017
Movie adaptations shouldn’t require that you know their source material. But in the case of The Glass Castle, it’s impossible not to just say it: You’re better off reading the book. Read full review
50
USA TodayBrian TruittAug 10, 2017
The Glass Castle offers up a movie clan to beat in terms of complete dysfunction, though the brutal and heart-wrenching film is in its own way just as much of a mess. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter TraversAug 10, 2017
Hollywood has a knack for sanitizing books that deserve better. In the case of The Glass Castle, it's a damn shame. Read full review
50
Philadelphia Daily NewsGary ThompsonAug 10, 2017
The Glass Castle is an unfortunately flat and messy adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ best-selling memoir about growing up with extreme poverty and with parents who both inspired and damaged her. Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)Emily YoshidaAug 10, 2017
Even those of us willing to accept that there are many different shades at work here will likely feel the foundation of the film fall out from under us by its conclusion. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsAug 10, 2017
You watch the movie, and you wonder: What was this life like, really? That’s a sign of a movie not quite answering the question. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeTy BurrAug 9, 2017
It’s a watchable disappointment that leaves mostly frustration in its wake. Read full review
42
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezAug 10, 2017
Intimate, but never actually involving, The Glass Castle at least has admirable performances to watch. Read full review
40
ScreenCrushE. Oliver WhitneyAug 17, 2017
The film never figures out how to merge Jeannette’s younger and older perspectives into one cohesive voice. Read full review
40
TheWrapClaudia PuigAug 6, 2017
In Cretton’s hands, this fact-based tale of an oddball, destitute upbringing rings false. It’s based on a woman’s complicated personal recollections of her traumatic childhood, and yet it feels like a cloying, one-note Hollywood tale, the beastly trauma all tied up with a pretty bow and de-fanged. Read full review
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