The Way We Were
Columbia Pictures | Release Date: October 19, 1973 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
61
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 11 Critic Reviews
Positive:
6
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
80
The Hollywood ReporterAlan R. Howard
Laurents' screenplay has a shocking sense of character truth, and The Way We Were says things that no one else has dared to say in a major Hollywood movie. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleStaff (Not Credited)
This tear-jerkiest of rom-coms about a couple struggling through fundamental differences will hit you right in the feels. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Essentially just a love story, and not sturdy enough to carry the burden of both radical politics and a bittersweet ending. Read full review
75
TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)
An engrossing, if occasionally ludicrous, hit tearjerker with Pollack, Streisand, and Redford doing a good job of bringing Arthur Laurents' script to the screen. Read full review
70
The New YorkerPauline Kael
The romantic star chemistry of Redford and Streisand turns a half-terrible movie into hit entertainment -- maybe even memorable entertainment.
67
The A.V. ClubJesse Hassenger
Redford and Streisand are the whole show, so scenes with various supporting characters drag. But Pollack’s film still manages to function as a glossy rebuke to the Hollywood standard of the unlikely romance. Read full review
60
EmpireWilliam Thomas
It all adds up to just another glossy Love Story. Read full review
60
Time OutStaff (Not Credited)
With the script glossing whole areas of confrontation (from the communist '30s to the McCarthy witch-hunts), it often passes into the haze of a nostalgic fashion parade. Read full review
60
Chicago ReaderDon Druker
A film about marriage that works reasonably well as a star vehicle for Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, but fails resoundingly as the caustic social comment director Sydney Pollack and writer Arthur Laurents obviously intended. Read full review
50
VarietyStaff (Not Credited)
A distended, talky, redundant and moody melodrama, combining young love, relentless 1930s and 1940s nostalgia, and spiced artifically with Hollywood Red-hunt pellets. The major positive achievement is Barbra Streisand's superior dramatic versatility, but Robert Redford has too little to work with in the script. Read full review
40
The New York TimesVincent Canby
By, some peculiar alchemy, The Way We Were turns into the kind of compromised claptrap that Hubbell is supposed to be making within the film and that we're meant to think is a sellout. It is. Read full review
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