The Paper

The Paper perfectly captures the hubbub of the nation's newsrooms. Read full review

It's an exhausting and exhilarating movie about the birth of "the daily miracle." Thanks to a caffeinated cast and hyperactive script, director Ron Howard delivers The Paper with a bang. Read full review

It's very perceptive about the relationships among its characters - how they talk, how they compete, what their values are. And Howard has cast the movie with splendid veteran actors, who are able to convey all the little quirks and idiosyncrasies of real people. Read full review

A high-voltage joy ride of journalistic fun. [16 March 1994]

I know it's not "Citizen Kane," but it pushes my buttons. [25 March 1994, p.47]

But what The Paper does best is capture the flavor of a newsroom at its craziest, when, say, you are five minutes past deadline on a breaking story, it's July and the air conditioning is broken, two editors are yelling contradictory commands at you and a workman is standing on your desk putting holes in the ceiling with a deafening electric drill. [25 March 1994, p.3H]

There are a few typos in The Paper, but they're honest - and honestly funny - mistakes. [25 March 1994, p.5]

Old-fashioned comedy with superb performances and insightful glimpses into the world of newspaper journalism. Read full review

Although the story line is somewhat stretched and overly neat, "The Paper" is a tight and entertaining read, uh, view. [14 March 1994]

Ending The Paper cleverly - in the spirit that it begins - doesn't appear to have occurred to Howard and the Koepps. And that disappointing ending is certainly the movie's loss. [25 March 1994]

The chaos, the confusion, the ongoing struggle between personality and purpose, The Paper really gets the beat, gets how a paper comes together and the beat at which that happens. Read full review

Keaton is at his most urgent and winning here. His fast-break, neurotic style — owlish stare, motor mouth — is perfect for the role of a compulsive news junkie who lives for the rush of his job. Read full review

The Paper is a crowd pleaser, and, regardless of any viewer's experience (or lack thereof) with the behind-the-scenes wrangling that goes on in newspaper offices, the story is affable and entertaining. While there are no startling revelations, the film's atmosphere contains enough strength of realism that more than one viewer may momentarily think of the goings-on at The Sun as they sit down with their morning cup of coffee and look at the day's headlines. Read full review

The Paper definitely works. By the time Hackett calls out that inevitable "Stop the presses!" Howard has caught all the romance of the great old newspaper movies - the camaraderie of the newsroom, the adrenaline rush that goes with the pursuit of a big story, the teary pride in the power of the press. [25 March 1994]

With its dream cast and a burst of cinematic endorphins, The Paper is delivered on time, its headlines written large for enjoyable mass consumption. [25 March 1994, p.D3]

The bad news is that The Paper, starring Michael Keaton, Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei, is unabashedly contrived, hopelessly simplistic and overly romantic about its target subject -- the frequently desperate art of putting out a big city daily newspaper. The good news is that all of the above results in a spirited if sometimes awkward big-screen entertainment.[25 March 1994, p.C1]

Striking a balance between Howard's harum-scarum comedies such as Night Shift and Splash and his fuzzy family "dramedies" such as Cocoon and Parenthood, The Paper delivers the goods - and also babies and the news. [25 March 1994, p.03]

A rambunctious look at a struggling New York tabloid, "The Paper" is Paddy Chayefsky lite. With every member of the all-star staff battling personal life crises as they race to put the next edition to bed, Ron Howard's pacy meller can't help but generate a fair share of humor, excitement and involvement. Read full review

You don’t expect director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer — partners on such benign jokefests as Splash! and Parenthood — to catch the mad-dog anarchy of the newsroom. But they nail it...What’s missing is the bite. Read full review

The movie captures exactly why those of us who do this for a living can't seem to shed ourselves of it: that crazed, dizzying, exhausting sense of being, if ever so briefly, where it's happening; and the sense that somewhere out there in the great unknown landscape that is our readership is somebody who cares what we write. The movie understands what draws people to Suns both real and imaginary. Read full review

Thanks to director Howard's casual grace and humanism and the cast's talent and agility, The Paper is an entertaining show. But, maybe the reason it looks so real and sounds so phony is that, while it's set in the world of today, it really wants the kick of the old movies, and it never hits the right fluctuating tone between drama and farce. It may have tabloid ambitions and a tabloid look-even a tabloid soul. But it doesn't have tabloid reflexes. [18 March 1994, p.A]

Ron Howard's The Paper starts out as a seductively overstuffed edition with breezy stories, a diverting layout, color-packed supplements and a strong editorial viewpoint. Eventually, it becomes more like the Jumble Puzzle on page 64G. [18 March 1994, p.4D]

Even though Howard captures the texture, the personalities, and the often-breakneck pace of a big city newsroom, the movie feels oddly light and feathery. In its last third, it briefly threatens to become a biting dark satire before settling on a disappointingly conventional path. Still, there's an awful lot of star power at work here, some of it hard to resist. The Paper is old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment: flashy, breezy, and not at all challenging. [25 March 1994, p.5]

The Paper is helped a great deal by its appealing cast, and there are plenty of cleverly drawn supporting characters to help move things along - Randy Quaid stands out as the paper's gun-toting columnist. [25 March 1994, p.46]

If The Paper were a newspaper story, a savvy editor would demand a rewrite. [25 March 1994, p.AE13]

Beyond letting its characters talk fast, use jargon and interrupt each other, "The Paper" misses most of the genre's real flavor. Its progress is methodical and sane. Read full review

A perennial innocent himself, Howard responds to the blunt professionalism of the hack pack with as much enthusiasm as Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks before him - but spoils it by insisting that somehow the tabloids have integrity. He likes his sincerity straight. Read full review

Director Ron Howard attempts the Great American Newspaper Picture and mostly pulls it off. The film's greatest weakness is that he and screenwriters David and Stephen Koepp (the latter a journalist himself) love those scrappy newshounds too much; THE PAPER doesn't even try for the appropriately acid bite of, say, any version of THE FRONT PAGE. Read full review

The story is blatantly contrived, milking every situation for maximum emotion and suspense; still, the picture has a lot of old-fashioned charm if you overlook its lapses into needless vulgarity, and its shameless insistence on giving male characters more dignity than their female counterparts. Michael Keaton is terrific as the hero. [18 March 1994, p.12]

The Paper never stops for breath long enough to be dull. But all this tumult also leads to a feeling of shellshock, of having every contrivance not nailed down thrown at the audience. Part of the problem is that many of these subplots, like Henry’s marital difficulties, are no more than Hollywood serious, dealing with adult situations in a bogus way that would be better avoided. Read full review