| Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) | Release Date: July 29, 2022 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
25
Mixed:
15
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
SlashfilmJul 25, 2022
Thirteen Lives is a film that truly orients itself around a grounded cinematic approach to story, one largely told without big, grandstanding emotional speeches but instead focused on visually capturing subjectivity, demonstrating tension, and highlighting the life-or-death weight of the characters' choices.utm_campaign=clip
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The PlaylistJul 28, 2022
Thirteen Lives is not an exhibition of spectacle in scale or execution. It neither skirts over details too quickly nor goes too deep into technical aspects, arming the audience with enough to know how much is at stake and why. It’s an examination and dramatization of adversity and the complexity, strength, and resilience of the human spirit, which perfectly draws characterizations that avoid hammy tropes and tired stereotypes.
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Movie NationAug 5, 2022
Howard finds the heart in this story, and the perfect places to pluck the heartstrings. It’s an emotional movie, given a real-time “What we don’t know yet” urgency by Nicholson’s script, and a sort of awestruck “Look what these 5,000 people did just to save these children” credulity by one of Hollywood’s greatest “movies with heart” filmmakers.
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Aug 3, 2022
Thirteen Lives is a solid achievement, technically and dramatically, using a ticktock timeline and periodically superimposing on-screen maps of the miles-long cave system to build tension. Like its protagonists, it isn’t flashy but is all business. It gets the job done with a minimum of histrionics, yet a mountain of suspense.
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Jul 28, 2022
Ron Howard’s claustrophobically intense and captivating “Thirteen Lives” is one of those movies where you find yourself marveling at the daunting logistics involved in re-creating one of the most famed and complex rescue efforts in recent history—but with an excessive running time of 147 minutes, by the time the story wraps up, we’re almost too exhausted to fully appreciate what we’ve just experienced.
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Jul 27, 2022
It’s a film that has some obvious parallels to Howard’s Apollo 13, a docudrama about a small group of endangered people in a claustrophobic space, with worldwide media attention on a rescue effort and a happy ending, thanks to technological ingenuity, courage, and collective effort.
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Aug 2, 2022
By the end of the story, the film’s aims are clear: to show what an absolute miracle the rescue was, and to honor the extraordinary cooperation and selflessness of those who came to help. Yes, that’s inspirational. But it also quietly counters a Hollywood history besotted with lone rangers and mavericks. Everyone matters.
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Jul 25, 2022
When Howard focuses on the head-scratching mechanics of the mission itself, Thirteen Lives excels – and its many claustrophobic underwater scenes likely play excellently inside the confines of a darkened theatre. But by the time we’re in pure rescue mode, it is almost too late. What should be the highest of high-stakes dramas arrives with a drippy thud.
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Jul 25, 2022
It’s a restrained rendering of the events, a drama that plays, at times, like a documentary. But if Howard’s decision to spotlight the Thai characters in this harrowing narrative is a sound one, there’s an unfamiliar stiffness and self-consciousness in the director’s approach — an inability to marry the fast-paced, no-nonsense heroics that are his strong suit with more emotionally textured storytelling. The resulting awkwardness prevents the movie, for all the surreal tension and bravery it depicts, from feeling urgent or surprising.
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IndieWireJul 25, 2022
Told with no frills, less personality, and just enough quiet dignity to sustain itself for 18 days (or 147 minutes), Howard’s serviceable “Thirteen Lives” is a far cry from the kind of souped-up spectacle some of his Hollywood contemporaries might create out of this material. And yet, its let the story speak for itself approach feels misjudged in the aftermath of a documentary so rich with big personalities, knotted with stomach-churning suspense, and shadowed by a lingering sense of ethical ambivalence.
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