Twenty one years on and there's still much to love in Crowe's last great work, and it's hard not to well up when the whole bus sing Elton John's Tiny Dancer.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 4, 2024

If you haven't already sold your soul to rock & roll, Almost Famous should seal the deal. It’s pure pleasure. Just don’t expect the dark side. Not since A Hard Day’s Night has a movie caught the thrumming exuberance of going where the music takes you.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 26, 2024

The film shimmers with the irresistible pleasures that define Hollywood at its best -- it's polished like glass, funny, knowing and bright, and filled with characters whose lives are invariably sexier and more purposeful than our own.

| Mar 26, 2024

This movie splashes a toast of Jack Daniels on the grave, scribbling graffiti optimism on the tombstone: Rock is dead. Long live rock.

| Original Score: A | Mar 26, 2024

It's a coming-of-age tale compressed into a few mad weeks. And Crowe, the ex-journalist, captures the essence of good journalism -- its watchfulness, persistence and that instinct for a good human story.

| Mar 26, 2024

[Almost Famous] is eager to please and does just that, but it’s neither as outright funny nor as resonant as it seems to want to be.

| Mar 26, 2024

Mr. Crowe, working in the predominantly no environment of studio production, has managed to make a wonderful, personal movie that says yes to love of music and love of life.

| Mar 26, 2024

Oh, what a lovely film. I was almost hugging myself while I watched it.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 26, 2024

Resistance to the euphoric swell is futile: suddenly, vintage Elton is unselfconsciously cool again. That's what Crowe can do at his best. He makes irony seem ridiculous, which itself is beautifully ironic for someone trying to keep rock alive.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 26, 2024

This is the 43-year-old Crowe’s family album, the equivalent of a supergroup tribute to the people who set him on his path in life. It is a love letter from a fan, and it is written from the heart.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 26, 2024

It rocks hard and sweetly, making that past live and sing for us. I loved this movie madly, and so will many of you.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 26, 2024

Almost Famous is a case study in the decline of music and movies. Both want to keep the fun in profundity. But neither has figured out how to have it both ways.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 26, 2024

Hollywood filmmaking at its best, brimming over with feeling, texture, spirit, and several kinds of keenness that transmute experience into big pop myth.

| Mar 26, 2024

It doesn't have the obsessive, closed-in feel that mars many personal projects. You don't even have to like rock and roll to enjoy it. You just have to like people, which Crowe obviously does.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 26, 2024

A not-quite-great but thoroughly enchanting memoir. Raggedy as the clothes and shaggy as the coifs sported by its characters, it is the movie equivalent of A Sentimental Education.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 26, 2024

Crowe is a charming storyteller with a knack for romantic comedy that is actually romantic, and he shows his chops here. Even so, by movie's end, I'd had my fill of Patrick Fugit... There are too many good actors stealing too many scenes from him here.

| Original Score: B | Mar 26, 2024

It's heartfelt, funny, sensitive and wise, and Crowe's obvious love for the music runs so deep that the film ends up rattling around in your soul, like a thumping bass on the other side of a thin apartment wall.

| Original Score: A | Mar 26, 2024

The real achievement of Almost Famous is its point of view -- that sense of passion and discovery that imbued Crowe and now spills out, unpolluted, onto the screen.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 26, 2024

[Cameron Crowe] captures something vivid and pulsating and heartfelt: the excitement of being in a very special place at just the right time.

| Mar 26, 2024

At least as far as its passion is concerned, Almost Famous is almost perfect.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 26, 2024