- 7
As varied as his films have been -- from The Wedding Banquet to The Ice Storm to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Brokeback Mountain -- director Ang Lee has never made a bad one, and the genial comedy Taking Woodstock certainly doesn?t break his streak.
—Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune
- 7
...entertaining...
—Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times
- 6
...pleasant enough, but it's too swept up in the spirit it's celebrating to ask the relevant questions...
—Keith Phipps Onion AV Club
- 6
...a bit like the festival itself ? a happy mess.
—Peter Rainer Christian Science Monitor
- 6
Whether the filmmakers were limited by rights issues or simply chose to not use concert footage, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, the Band, the Grateful Dead, name your rock legend, remain frustratingly out of reach.
—Peter Travers Rolling Stone
- 6
...surprisingly bland...
—Claudia Puig USA Today
- 6
Though intermittently amusing and exhilarating, Taking Woodstock can't quite pull together its threads into one totally trippy tapestry.
—Matt Stevens E!
- 6
...impressively staged, thinly written...
—Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly
- 5
...plays like a wooden, straightforward soap opera that is far too well-meaning for its own good. The movie adopts a hippie attitude without the added psychedelic benefit of hippie drugs.
—Jason McKiernan filmcritic.com
- 5
...fails to immerse us in the visceral feeling of being there...
—Ryan Stewart Slant Magazine
- 4
Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock achieves an amazing feat: It turns the fabled music festival, a key cultural moment of the late 20th century, into an exceedingly lame, heavily clichéd, thumb-sucking bore.
—Lou Lumenick New York Post