Where most contemporary directors would be looking for ways to demonstrate their superiority to the material -- dropping in campy asides or meaningless technical flourishes -- Schumacher is looking for ways to make it work.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 1, 2013

Donate the ticket money you would have spent to medical research, and stay home.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 1, 2013

Yes, it is good to see how much of a difference actors can make with flimsy material, but wouldn't it be nice if they had something with more than the emotional weight of a Twinkie to work on?

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 1, 2013

The onslaught-of-illness stuff is rendered not with emotion but with makeup and lighting. The actors are reduced to models in a film that tries to sell compassion by the shot.

Full Review | Jul 1, 2013

These people are like an adolescent's idea of adulthood. They're junior high schoolers without zits, emotionally arrested and unaware of it.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 1, 2013

Will someone please, please, write a part for Julia Roberts and not be happy just to look at her?

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 1, 2013

Worst of all, Dying Young is a love story about two people who don't seem to be in love with each other.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 1, 2013

Hilary O'Neil is poor but healthy, uneducated but full of spunky common sense. Victor Geddes is rich but mortally ill, overeducated and understandably fearful and withdrawn. In other words, they are made for each other.

| Jul 1, 2013

Dying Young isn't a shameless weeper, but that's not necessarily to its credit. In a genre like this, sometimes ''tasteful'' just means confused.

| Original Score: C- | Sep 7, 2011

Julia's hot; Dying Young is lukewarm.

| Mar 26, 2009

A movie like this has only one not-so-noble reason to exist: to make us sob. And it just doesn't deliver the goods.

| Oct 18, 2008

Shamateurishly directed, this Roberts vehicle traversing the clichd class-clash/love story territory of Pretty Woman is a dog.

| Jan 26, 2006

A pretty, decorative movie about messy lives and a tale best appreciated by those willing to check their taste for realism at the door.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 20, 2003

Death gets the glamour treatment in this genderbending ripoff of Love Story.

| May 12, 2001

Dying Young ultimately succeeds because it embodies that secret hope that most of us so desperately want to believe in: love can conquer all, even death.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Scott has Given Up On Life. You can tell from his apartment, which is nearly devoid of pop-culture clutter and kept in sepulchral shade.

| Jan 1, 2000

The treatment is blase when it means to be reverential, standoffish when it ought to just go ahead and be sentimental.

| Jan 1, 2000

Dying Young is a long, slow slog of a movie, up to its knees in drippy self-pity as it marches wearily toward its inevitable ending.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000