This epic was made by a bland megalomaniac (The Indians should have named him "Plays with Camera"). You look at that untroubled face and know he can make everything lightweight.

| Nov 8, 2022

Even with its flaws, Dances With Wolves is cause for celebration, a haunting elegy to the end of the Great Plains wilderness.

| Nov 8, 2022

It's difficult for any actor to direct himself effectively. It's amazing when someone does it in an epic that turns out as fine as this tale of the Old West.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 8, 2022

Dances With Wolves is an audacious personal film, done big and done right. Somewhere John Ford must be nodding his approval.

| Nov 8, 2022

Beginning with [a] kind of comically earnest freshness, Dances with Wolves stretches into an engaging, noble, epic vision worthy of filling a screen so wide it seems to literally sweep from sea to shining sea.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Nov 7, 2022

It is a personal story played out in a wide-open setting. It has stunning action (especially a breathtaking buffalo hunt) and moments of serenity. But the one thing that sets this frontier story apart from the norm is its dignity.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 7, 2022

It's corny in spots, and it could benefit from a good, hard edit. But it still works well, benefiting from handsome photography, strong performances and a surprising amount of humor.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 3, 2022

It’s much more than good intentions: It’s good movie making. Dances With Wolves is an exhilarating adventure in a spectacular Western landscape.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 3, 2022

Even if the camera technique is occasionally laughable, this is also an enjoyable, stirring, and extremely conscientious old-fashioned movie, with some essential things done right. It's the best movie Robert Redford never made.

| Nov 2, 2022

A conservationist Western? An eco-Westem? Dances with Wolves wears its New Age labels with casual pride and, more importantly, rises above them.

| Nov 2, 2022

It is part of the business of filmmaking to put arguments simply and even simplistically at times/ But when it is done as well as this, by (of all people) a Hollywood star in his first feature, we should all raise a cheer.

| Nov 2, 2022

The film is saved by a laudable attempt at ethnographical accuracy, by the uncluttered simplicity of its storytelling and -- most of all -- by a humanity that only occasionally threatens to slide into sentimentalism.

| Nov 2, 2022

Although everyone involved is under the impression that the film is an epic, it is actually a pastoral with flurries of action, an idyll with ructions rather than a vision of heroic struggle. There is nowhere near enough conflict to justify [its length].

| Nov 2, 2022

Kevin Costner, one of Hollywood's new generation of star actors, makes a splendid debut as a director with Dances With Wolves, an ecologically sound, gloriously romantic and buoyant, if over-inflated, tragicomic Western.

| Nov 2, 2022

On paper, Dances with Wolves looks like another Heaven's Gate... But not only has this epic successfully disinterred a long-buried genre, it's a triumph on all levels that establishes Costner as a born film-maker.

| Nov 2, 2022

Once it gets moving, Kevin Costner's homage to the Indian horse culture of the northern Great Plains becomes an irresistible force, taking the viewer on a long and sometimes bumpy but ultimately very enjoyable ride.

| Nov 2, 2022

By never falling into the trap of allowing spectacle to supersede character, Costner's Dances with Wolves restores depth, idealism, poignancy and even wonder to a genre that had long seemed moribund.

| Apr 27, 2018

It's an engrossing tale, and Costner directs with the confidence of a Hollywood veteran well aware that entertainment comes before earnestness.

| Feb 6, 2018

This is a big picture in love with our landscape as much as with the Sioux Indians who inhabit it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 21, 2015

The important issues raised by the film -- centered on the cultural, racial and moral struggle that took place on the American frontier -- are glossed over in favor of a juvenile fantasy of male bonding around the campfire.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 13, 2014