Disney has found a Grecian formula that promises to be an Olympic-sized hit.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 18, 2024

Bursting with action and over-the-top goofiness, it's the most energetic animation to come out of Disney since Aladdin.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 18, 2024

Dazzling the eye, pleasing the ear, tickling the funny bone -- these are all the things you'd want from a musical comedy. And Hercules delivers, big time.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 18, 2024

In the galaxy of Disney movies, it's near the top but not among the greatest like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and the original 101 Dalmatians. Still, a good-but-not-great Disney is Olympian fields ahead of the competition's best.

| Dec 18, 2024

Hercules has it all: fun for the kids, a nice object lesson or two, and enough humor to keep the grown-ups entertained. The Disney lightning strikes again.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024

It's clever, empty, imaginatively drawn, more for adults than kids, and yet further evidence that the great American public is no longer thought capable of responding to anything beyond the present moment and their own backyard.

| Dec 18, 2024

Directed by John Muster and Ron Clements, Hercules has the buoyancy of their The Little Mermaid (but not its excellent score) and the sass of their Aladdin (without being a one-genie show).

| Original Score: A- | Dec 18, 2024

Hercules, all told, deserves a Greek chorus of congratulations. Not every movie manages to be both hit and myth.

| Dec 18, 2024

There are several reasons why people will flock to Hercules, one being its reassuring rootedness in the old Disney tradition, another being its imaginativeness in extending that tradition in new stylistic directions.

| Dec 18, 2024

For grown-ups who want to see animation treated as an art form, Hercules is already a winner.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 18, 2024

Jazzed by a rollicking musical score from Alan Menken and David Zippel and boasting a prodigious cast of voice talents, Hercules is an Olympian effort that proves to be one of the funniest and most purely enjoyable animated films of recent years.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024

Hercules will probably not be remembered as one of Disney's greatest films. But that is only because it is following in the steps of immortals. Still, the new toon is funny, smart, imaginative and vividly realized.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 18, 2024

As Hades, a fiend with blue-flame hair, James Woods just about walks off with the movie.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 18, 2024

The script is nimble and funny, mostly broad but sometimes surprisingly whimsical or quick-witted, as well it should be, with humor and polish added by former stand-up comics credited with an Emmy-nominated Seinfeld episode.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 18, 2024

Hercules is never a bad film, but it's a lot like Saturday morning cartoons. It's an empty, emotionally unsatisfying movie that doesn't teach children any kind of lesson.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024

Students of Greek mythology may have some problems with Disney's legendary liberties taken with the story. But kids and most everyone else won't care in the least. They'll be too busy enjoying the comic adventures.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 18, 2024

Even as it murders Bullfinch, Edith Hamilton and Robert Graves, Hercules is a visual and verbal feast, a killer Olympian banquet.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 18, 2024

While Disney's 35th animated feature is not the stuff of classical studies, it is a classical gas.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024

The movie's overindulgence in reflexive winks directed toward a more adult audience upset the typical, successful balance between parodic humor and uncomplicated, action-fueled plot that other Disney animated features have achieved in the past.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 18, 2024

Packed with Olympian delights and Herculean feats of animation, snapping with live-wire wit and wisecracks, Hercules is one of the funniest and most purely entertaining of all the recent Disney cartoon features.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2024