This isn’t material for actors, no matter what their age. It’s material for milking tears from an audience.

| Sep 18, 2023

Definitely soppy in places but also genuinely moving.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 18, 2021

Adapted by Ernest Thompson from his 1979 play of the same name, Mark Rydell's classy weepie follows an elderly couple holidaying in their idyllic lakeside house in New England.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 18, 2021

Every time the movie almost reduces its audience to sobbing, there's clever laugh to ease the tension and bring everyone back to reality. It's a marvelous triumph.

| Aug 18, 2021

Here is the almost perfect motion picture.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 18, 2021

If you can check your cynicism at the door, here's a two-hour tonic guaranteed to lift your spirits.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 18, 2021

Its themes of lifelong love, loyalty and devotion, and of lifelong hunger for what is needed from a parent, are emotional depth charges.

| Aug 18, 2021

On Golden Pond is fearlessly sentimental. Like a bullet, it travels a highly predictable arc, and goes the distance on energy expended at the beginning of its flight.

| Aug 18, 2021

As a curious, stilted tribute to Fonda, Hepburn and Fonda, "On Golden Pond" serves its purpose. But, as drama, it's only one tiny bubble away from pure soap opera.

| Aug 18, 2021

The intrusions of real life give the film a resonance it would not otherwise enjoy, and add to the emotions it touches.

| Aug 18, 2021

It tugs the heart as few films of recent years have done, and I defy anyone to see it without at least a few tears.

| Aug 18, 2021

A premature obituary, some have carped. So what. I can think of very little I'd rather read than the delicate lines in these two adored, now-aged faces.

| Dec 7, 2020

Without question, these are major, meaty roles for Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, and there could have been little doubt that the two would work superbly together.

| Oct 17, 2019

On Golden Pond is a rare and beautiful movie, radiating with humanity. Ernest Thompson has adroitly adapted his successful play to the screen, adding pictorial scope without sacrificing the human interplay.

| Oct 22, 2018

There is a natural rhythm to the film that makes its own quiet, life-affirming statement.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 6, 2013

When it sometimes seems the whole society has spiritually decamped for Tinseltown, the movie offers the hope that people can come home again-at least for a visit.

| Jun 7, 2011

Two of Hollywood's best-loved veterans deserved a far better swan song than this sticky confection.

| Jan 26, 2006

Watching the movie, I felt I was witnessing something rare and valuable.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 23, 2004

On Golden Pond is a mixed blessing, but it offers one performance of rare quality and three others that are very good. That's not half-bad.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 30, 2004

The cinematic equivalent of shrink-wrapping, in which all of the ideas, feelings, characters, and images are neatly separated and hermetically sealed to prevent spoilage, abrasion, or any contact with the natural world.

| Jan 1, 2000