Running on Empty is as earnest as they come, delving with ostensible sincerity into the spirit, if not the substance, of the ’60s.

| Jul 13, 2022

The ambivalent hypocrisy of [Running on Empty] would make it intolerable if not for an astute Lumet who shifts focus to turn it onto a conflict of loyalty with the eldest son. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jun 21, 2022

...completely compelling and entirely rewarding...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 7, 2022

"Running on Empty" is a brilliant movie, a gripping story that works on many levels.

| May 25, 2021

Hirsch as a '60s radical is hard to swallow. He looks and moves more like a professor of American political history than someone who made history.

| Original Score: 5/10 | May 25, 2021

Its essential generosity is its most laudable aspect: its sympathy for the idealism of antiwar radicals seems like the real thing.

| May 25, 2021

The dramatic possibilities are endless. For some reason, however, Lumet patches his film together with a quilt of cliches.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 25, 2021

The feel-indifferent movie of 1988.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | May 25, 2021

"Running on Empty," helped by uniformly excellent performances, is a thoughtful, moving and, yes, dramatic look at a family's struggle to stay together.

| May 25, 2021

Running on Empty, for all its implausibilities and pseudo-radical bourgeois banter, is an unusually engaging movie.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 25, 2021

The movie has definite flaws, but it is genuinely moving thanks in part to River Phoenix's sensitive performance as the teenage son.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 25, 2021

River Phoenix's solid portrayal lends excellence to the film's generally workmanlike approach to handling a gimmicky plot device.

| Original Score: 5/10 | May 25, 2021

A John Hughes-ish teen drama unaccountably complicated by politics and method acting.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 25, 2021

Despite Lumet's home-spun pincer movement on the espionage/conspiracy genres, cliché still sneaks up and nips the film into submission.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 25, 2021

Sophisticated, uncompromising and refreshingly original, it is one of those rare films which is likely to mean as much to teens as it does to their parents.

| May 25, 2021

It's the Lumet film I like best.

| Original Score: A- | May 17, 2011

Wraps around your heart and squeezes.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 2, 2011

Successfully operates on several levels - as study of the primacy of the family unit, an anguished teen romance, a coming-of-age story and a look at what happened to some political radicals a generation later.

| Mar 26, 2009

This is a rites of passage movie with a difference, in that it's politically intelligent and never crass.

| Feb 9, 2006

River Phoenix gives an Oscar nominated performance as the teenage son of radical parents in Sidney Lumet's interesting but not entirely satisfying politicial melodrama.

| Original Score: B | Jun 18, 2005