Anyone who’s read Jon Krakauer’s best-selling nonfiction account knows the details, but actually seeing McCandless’s travels is still thrilling. Yet... are we ­supposed to salute this foray into the wild or shake our heads at the sheer ­idiocy?

| Sep 8, 2023

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 18, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Even Penn's more indulgent flourishes seem to enhance the film's keen feeling.

Full Review | Jul 6, 2010

Penn's main idea about going native is making eye contact with a deer.

| Original Score: C | Feb 22, 2008

The film is about people trying to live good lives and that is ultimately a serious and worthwhile subject. Into The Wild is one of the best films of the year.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 1, 2008

One of the best American films of the year, even if you do feel more impatient with McCandless than Penn seems to.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 9, 2007

A young man with plenty of advantages renounces the modern world, wounds his family deeply and is acclaimed a sort of saint.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 9, 2007

Sean Penn's majestic travelogue about a young drop-out on an idealistic quest in the great American outback is the best film the writer-director has ever made.

| Nov 9, 2007

A dream movie.

| Nov 9, 2007

There is food for thought and food for every kind of feeling in Sean Penn's outstanding film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 9, 2007

Although McCandless's story is undoubtedly fascinating, and Penn's film contains moments of magic, it is a lesser piece of work because it prefers to accept its subject at face value rather than ask a few crucial questions.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 9, 2007

The photography is of the sort you'd find in any half decent nature documentary, with cloying emphasis placed firmly (and sometimes clumsily) on the idea that our neglectful, selfish and not to mention rampantly capitalist ways are destroying the planet.

| Original Score: 3/6 | Nov 8, 2007

With the whole of America as his backdrop, Penn pulls off his most ambitious movie yet. The result is a beautiful and thought-provoking road movie.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 8, 2007

Deserts, mountains, railroads, bears and a sad and lonely epiphany about the nature of human existence!

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 7, 2007

Emile Hirsch captures all of the arrogance, integrity, naiveté and charm of this complex, troubled young man.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 6, 2007

Hirsch, who carries the film on his increasingly emaciated shoulders, performs heroically, but there's an edge missing.

| Nov 1, 2007

I walked away from Into the Wild feeling that Penn was too in love with the idea of Christopher McCandless the free-spirited hero to excavate the soul of Christopher McCandless the lost man.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 19, 2007

Without diminishing the deep transcendentalist yearnings of its young hero, Into the Wild builds to a climax of profound human connectedness, profound human pain.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 5, 2007

Into the Wild takes your heart and shakes it, offering inspiration, exasperation and blunt realization in a true story of one young man's dream and nightmare.

| Original Score: A | Oct 5, 2007