Something has been lost in translation from stage to screen because what's there now does not seem strong enough to have won best musical and best score on Broadway. And at 137 minutes, it does go on.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 11, 2021

It's the cinema equivalent of rubbing cut onions in the eyes of the audience: film-making that is cynically and artificially engineered to make the audience weep.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 24, 2021

The endless emotional frankness of the lyrics - those who seek the ironic distance of Sondheim need look elsewhere - becomes exhausting all too quickly.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 22, 2021

The film is aggressively needy.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 22, 2021

The film becomes one giant gamble that's quite disastrously failed to pay off.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 21, 2021

On all fronts, you wish that Dear Evan Hansen had nothing to do with Evan Hansen.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 21, 2021

The problems start the more sincere it all gets - with a deeply dubious message for children and parents alike that the world is a place of infinite forgiveness. As Ben Platt would learn - not quite.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 21, 2021

In recycling played out tropes, Dear Evan Hansen delivers surface-level and ableist representations of mental health challenges.

| Oct 20, 2021

In the end, this film suffocates you with ersatz compassion and personal growth.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 20, 2021

Dear Evan Hansen could never work, not really, but any hope the film has of fostering sympathy for Hansen went out with the window with an actor born in the 1990s.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Oct 15, 2021

Conner is a faceless mannequin, even at the end when lessons are supposedly learned and life continues on, and I found that inexcusable.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 13, 2021

Platt's physical presence is all wrong, but his vocal performance is outstanding; you can see how, with the distance between audience and performer that the Broadway stage affords, his performance would land a lot better.

| Oct 8, 2021

We're more conscious of how facile its story is because the musical numbers - the ballad-heavy score is by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul - don't land the way they did onstage, their wistfulness now registering as listless.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 3, 2021

The truth is, this musical is manipulative, and strange...Upbeat tunes and a heavy storyline about teen suicide make a cringey combo.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 2, 2021

"Evan Hansen" is not a disaster, but the pieces don't quite all come together.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 30, 2021

There's a lot to like about Dear Evan Hansen, which raises timely questions and features tuneful, smartly crafted songs.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 29, 2021

Once you turn on this character, the whole movie becomes unbearable and repellant.

| Sep 29, 2021

I don't buy for one second that Ben Platt is a 17-year-old boy in this film at all. The story depends on that, so it's undermined from the beginning.

| Sep 29, 2021

Let's face it, Evan Hansen is actually a hateful, self-serving character who becomes a phony symbol of peace, tolerance and compassion by using others for his own gain.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 28, 2021

On stage, audiences can give melodrama more leeway. It's a prerequisite for a medium where people express themselves by spontaneously breaking into song.

| Sep 24, 2021