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

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

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

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

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

This potential classic is partially tamed by the dictates of big-budget Hollywood. While it's a heartfelt, smart and funny film, Almost Famous isn't quite tough or eccentric enough to supersede High Fidelity as the year's best movie about rock fandom.

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

Accurate as the film might be, it seems more suited to a memoir than a movie, at least a movie as slickly made and sweetly manipulative as Almost Famous.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 26, 2024

Almost Famous has the sentiment and sweetness of a good coming-of-age movie but lacks the drive and pulse that makes for a great rock and roll movie.

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

It systematically pulls the teeth from rock music, detaching it from all sense of danger, excitement and hedonism, making it instead of soundtrack for Crowe's heartwarming, mind-numbing morality tale about family values.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 26, 2024

Combining a terrific score with a clever story, Almost Famous is a high-energy road picture with a heart.

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

Almost Famous, in fact, comes achingly close to being a wonderful movie. Call it almost wonderful.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 26, 2024

This is not an exposé, something the film makes clear from the outset. It's a memory piece. Those memories are pleasant, and so is the movie.

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