Editing out many of the body blows and personal fouls from Bissinger's hard-hitting account, Friday Night Lights on film tends to punt just when true insight demands going for first down.
Comment
10/08/04
Friday Night Lights (2004)
81
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:162
Fresh:132
Rotten:30
Average Rating:7.2/10
Consensus: An acute survey of the football-obsessed heartland that succeeds as both a stirring drama and a rousing sports movie.
Theatrical Release:13-05-2005
Synopsis: From Oscar®-winning producer Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment and based on the best-selling book about high school football by H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights chronicles the entire 1988... [More]
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Tim McGraw, Derek Luke, Jay Hernandez
Director: Peter Berg
Reviews for Friday Night Lights
...an unusually dark and serious examination of the intense pressure put on [high school football players] in a poor town.
10/08/04
The saddest sports movie since Hoop Dreams.
10/08/04
The movie demonstrates the power of sports to involve us; we don't live in Odessa and are watching a game played 16 years ago, and we get all wound up.
10/08/04
Top CriticBlack is positively riveting to watch; who would have expected the gangly kid who befriended Carl Childers in Sling Blade to now be muscling his mentor out of the picture?
10/08/04
An accurate potrayal of Texas High School football and the overzealous participation of those not even on the team. Great stuff!
10/08/04
A passably made, grittily acted slice of life in Texas that veers not an inch from the norm for this sort of picture.
10/08/04
There's not much in Friday Night Lights that you haven't ever seen or couldn't have imagined. Relative to most Hollywood sports movies, however, it just feels new.
10/08/04
...refuses to shy away from the way high school football ... can trample a kid's love for the game.
10/08/04
Gripping? Gut wrenching? Sure, but if you've seen one high school football movie, especially one set in Texas, you've seen them all.
10/08/04
Peter Berg's skilled vision and Billy Bob's retrained performance result not only the best football film we’ve seen in years... but also one of the best movies of 2004.
10/08/04
The movie shows the good, the bad, and the brutality of the sport... with all the chills and thrills that you need, plus some.
10/08/04
Lights only diverts narrative tedium when the gladiators take the field; effectively drowning out the nonsense that eventually takes place off the field.
10/08/04
[T]he belief that high school athletics is something worth ruining lives over is more likely to strike one as pathetic than praiseworthy.
10/08/04
This is flat-out the rawest, most realistic piece of storytelling about the sport that I’ve ever seen.
10/08/04
Friday Night Lights fires up a gritty, grubby look at the dark underside of Texas' primary religion - football.
10/08/04
Friday Night Lights is a slice of small town life where the success or failure of their beloved team will resonate and set the mood of the townsfolk for the entire year
10/08/04
This impressive, inspirational story not only captures the exhilaration of the gridiron action but also the intense pressures of these communal rites and rituals.
10/08/04
...so ineptly and annoyingly filmed that it should be used in filmmaking classes... to demonstrate how not to make a movie.
10/08/04
A largely appealing drama, the kind of sports movie that anyone, even non-fans of football (like myself), can get wrapped up in and care about.
10/08/04
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