Reviews for this film from our members:
- [New – 7/2/15] | Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: Into the Woods is in fact, an OK film, but one that drags to where you pretty much start forgetting what you are watching.
- José Arce @ LaButaca.net [Spanish]
- Excerpt: Disney no deja pasar la oportunidad de amalgamar montones de personajes e iconos que forman parte de su propio esqueleto industrial con el salto al cine de uno de los musicales más queridos de Broadway. El resultado es notable, aunque puede agotar.
- Jason Bailey @ Flavorwire
- Excerpt: When I heard that Disney was behind the show’s film adaptation, I assumed they were just doing the first act. That’s not what happened — but what they have done is nearly as detrimental, turning over the text’s complexity and darkness to the empty-husk filmmaking of director Rob Marshall, who quite clearly doesn’t get this thing at all.
- Sarah D Bunting @ Tomato Nation
- Kevin Carr @ 7M Pictures
- Excerpt: If you love musicals and adore Sondheim’s work, you’ll likely love “Into the Woods.” However, if you’re not looking for the Broadway-on-screen experience, this is one to skip.
- Bill Clark @ From The Balcony
- Excerpt: Into the Woods is eighty minutes of energy and joy followed by forty more of tiresome, by-the-numbers visual effects. The drop-off in quality is notable.
- Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: Chris Pine sends up his golden boy image as the Prince who’s charming if not sincere, his singing amusingly exaggerated with trills and flourishes, but his shared number with Rapunzel’s Prince begins the film’s mid section bog down.
- Edwin Davies @ A Mighty Fine Blog
- Excerpt: Some of the musical sequences – particularly the hilarious “Agony”, in which Cinderella’s Prince (a gloriously hammy Chris Pine, who plays him with the voice of Richard Burton and the swagger of Zapp Brannigan) and Rapunzel’s Prince (Billy Magnussen) strut around a waterfall and sing about how difficult their lives as rich, handsome princes are – work very well because there isn’t much you can do to mess them up.
- Carlos del Río @ El rincón de Carlos del Río [Spanish]
- Excerpt: Desconozco el musical de Broadway, y no me hago una idea de cómo quedará en escena, pero desde luego, en pantalla no funciona en absoluto.
- Jim Dixon @ Examiner.com
- Excerpt: “Into the Woods” is a surprisingly humorless adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical known for its sly humor. As a movie, this is a disappointingly straight-faced morality tale that simply doesn’t seem to want to be entertaining.
- M. Enois Duarte @ High-Def Digest.com
- Mark Dujsik @ Mark Reviews Movies
- Excerpt: The central problem of the movie is one of redundancy.
- James Jay Edwards @ FilmFracture
- Excerpt: Into the Woods’ Captures The Spirit Of Sondheim In A Fun Hollywood Mashup
- Candice Frederick @ Reel Talk Online
- Sarah Gopaul @ Digital Journal
- Excerpt: ‘Into the Woods’ merges several fairy tales into an unexceptional musical about a baker and his wife tasked with collecting four magical items for a witch.
- Susan Granger @ www.susangranger.com
- Excerpt: Tuneful and enchanting – dare I say it’s even better than the stage version? Because Stephen Sondheim’s intricate music and insightful, tongue-twisting lyrics are crystal-clear.
- Vadym Grygoriev @ kinoblog.com [Ukrainian]
- Mark Hobin @ Fast Film Reviews
- Excerpt: It lumps along to a complete bummer of a conclusion that essentially undoes everything wonderful in the first section. Rarely has a movie gone so quickly from a whimsical delight to a dispirited drag.
- Charlie Juhl @ Citizen Charlie
- Excerpt: The Never-ending Story
- Ben Kendrick @ Screen Rant
- Excerpt: Into the Woods struggles in fine tuning prior iterations for the big screen, and finding its own identity as a film, but it’s still an overall enchanting and entertaining musical experience for all ages.
- Jeremy Kibler @ The Artful Critic
- Excerpt: Theatre brats can calm down. Before running out of steam a bit, “Into the Woods” is a vibrantly staged, musically ebullient, and wonderfully subversive screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s show, carried out by an excellent (and vocally trained) ensemble.
- Kristin Dreyer Kramer @ NightsAndWeekends.com
- Wesley Lovell @ Cinema Sight
- Excerpt: Even among those who consider Stephen Sondheim one of the greatest musical composers and lyricists in Broadway history, Into the Woods is considered a minor effort and if you were to take the adaptation Rob Marshall puts forth, you’d be quite justified in that impression.
- Dan Lybarger @ KCActive.com
- Excerpt: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1986 musical play Into the Woods puts a lot of the darkness back into the those tales, and the studio that bears Walt Disney’s name is ironically a good custodian of their vision.
- Alan Mattli @ Facing the Bitter Truth [German]
- Excerpt: It’s not as radical in its wicked deconstruction of fairytales as the Sondheim/Lapine stage original, but Marshall does manage to keep some of the musical’s subversive bite.
- Mike McGranaghan @ The Aisle Seat
- Excerpt: When Johnny Depp is the most subtle thing in your movie, you know you’ve maybe gone a little too far over the top.
- Ross Miller @ Thoughts On Film
- Excerpt: For all its own gothic glamour and undeniable bravado, there’s something messy and even distracting about the approach to how it mixes its music with the plot and characters.
- Simon Miraudo @ Quickflix
- Pat Mullen @ Cinemablographer
- Stefan Pape @ HeyUGuys
- Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
- João Pinto @ Portal Cinema [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: Um musical competente mas sem magia ou fogo.
- Jason Pirodsky @ Expats.cz
- Excerpt: A drab, cynical amalgamation of famous fairy tales tropes only occasionally brought to life through some lively performances and Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful music and lyrics, the Disney-produced film adaptation of Into the Woods is a drag.
- [New – 7/2/15] | Nuno Reis @ SciFiWorld Portugal [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: O maior defeito desta adaptação foi a falta de entrosamento que no palco seria ganha em semanas ou meses. As constantes trocas dos interlocutores em cena precisavam de mais tempo para ganharem naturalidade.
- Jamie S. Rich @ DVDTalk
- Excerpt: It’s light and airy to watch, but still somehow too much. Soulless and frenzied, and yet still kind of effortlessly entertaining.
- Tom Santilli @ Examiner.com
- Excerpt: It was a visual achievement for sure, but this time, the shoe just didn’t fit.
- Frank Swietek @ One Guys Opinion
- Excerpt: It’s heartening at a time when movie musicals remain an endangered species, such loving care has gone into bringing one of Sondheim’s most ingenious, affecting works to the screen without unduly compromising what makes it so special.
- Sarah Ward @ artsHub
