Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Hosseini's over-done melodrama that doesn't so much open our eyes to Afghanistan as reinforce everything negative we've already suspected.

| Original Score: C- | Jan 29, 2008

The Kite Runner is dramatically and visually sumptuous

| Jan 3, 2008

Perhaps he might have been tougher but that might have rendered the film less digestible.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 28, 2007

Based on Khaled Hosseini's highly regarded novel, this story of exile, ambition and betrayal has an emotional power that outstrips its occasional implausibilities.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 28, 2007

The measured mise-en-scne is fine for the boyhood scenes. Character-building alternates with brief bursts of image music, such as the kite-flying contest that fills the Kabul sky with darting, colourful fabric-birds.

| Dec 28, 2007

There's something timid and tasteful about the filmmaking which struck me as pretty mendacious, in a story about a blood bond severed by rape and mended, a generation on, by a rather too tidy act of atonement.

| Dec 28, 2007

A workmanlike, if decaffeinated version of Khaled Hosseini's bestselling novel.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 28, 2007

An enthralling piece of cinema.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 28, 2007

The film's belief in the power of redemption and its subtle assertion of the need for moral courage in personal (or political) conflict, is never allowed to get in the way of its boldly told, intelligent, informed and affecting story.

| Original Score: 4/6 | Dec 28, 2007

An engaging melodrama whose less convincing plot points are superseded by some astonishingly affecting performances from the mostly unknown cast.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 26, 2007

A respectful adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 21, 2007

If The Kite Runner flies only to flutter and fall a bit, at least it flies for a while.

| Original Score: B- | Dec 21, 2007

The filmmakers go by the book in The Kite Runner, a literate, if occasionally listless adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 21, 2007

An example of how good intentions don't necessarily make for a good movie.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 21, 2007

This is one of those stories that, on some primal level, goes straight to the heart.

| Original Score: B | Dec 20, 2007

By the time it arrives at its final kite-flying scene back in the Bay Area, The Kite Runner has soared occasionally, but remains too grounded for its own good in the book from which it was supposed to spring.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 20, 2007

[It] boasts one of the best performances by a child actor, ever.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 20, 2007

Whilst some of the vivid detail in Khalid Hosseini's best-selling novel does get lost in translation, director Marc Forster hits all the emotional high notes.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 18, 2007

It's a haunting story.

Full Review | Dec 17, 2007