The River

Universal Pictures | Release Date: January 11, 1985

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

46	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 11 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Gene Siskel

The River is nothing more than a conventional, albeit pretty, melodrama. [11 Jan 1985, p.4N]

Staff (Not Credited)

Stripped down to the bare essentials few people actually ever come into contact with, pic remains a rather private ordeal observed from the outside looking in. There is a victory at the end, but not a sense of lasting triumph. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

A good film for the viewer who isn't interested in being entertained but is willing to be thrown into the muck of the problems facing hard-working American farmers. Read full review

Bob Thomas

Sissy Spacek and Mel Gibson suffer admirably as the farm couple, but their roles have no real dimension. [15 Jan 1985]

Roger Ebert

You know a movie's got problems when you find yourself wishing the heroes would agree with the villain. Read full review

Vincent Canby

The River has a meticulously detailed physical production and, from time to time, is acted with passion by its cast. Yet its ideas are so profoundly muddled that the film must run mainly on sentimentality. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

The message of continuous hardship is somewhat at odds with the same impulse towards idyllic lyricism that Rydell brought to On Golden Pond. Vilmos Zsigmond contributes his usual handsome photography, but this is one river that seems unlikely to run. Read full review

David Sterritt

The River doesn't live up to its ambitions. [03 Jan 1985, p.27]

Rita Kempley

Gibson, the thinking man's Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Spacek, a rawboned Raggedy Ann, are nearly silent partners in this largely visual parable. Despite their good looks and best efforts, the film falters. [11 Jan 1985, p.19]

David Ansen

Rydell and his writers compose a kind of Farmers' Book of Job as they pile one misery after another on the Garveys. But all this suffering does not turn them into real people. They're those old Hollywood standbys, Mr. and Mrs. Indomitable Human Spirit. [31 Dec 1984, p.65]

Paul Attanasio

Rydell shoots the movie as if it had been commissioned by the Department of Agriculture. His scenes have such brute intentionality, they never come to life -- they're instant, airless cliche's. And who can believe that Mel Gibson is a down-and-out farmer? [11 Jan 1985, p.B1]