When Thirteen Lives directs its energies toward illustrating the impossibility of the divers’ mission, the film is solidly compelling.

| Dec 2, 2022

Thirteen Lives is a beautiful depiction of the power of working together for hope.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 21, 2022

There’s little in Thirteen Lives that isn’t a matter of public record or treated with more urgency and tension in The Rescue.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 3, 2022

Ron Howard’s film is a restrained but still gripping retelling, led by a commitment to realism and a deep respect for all those involved.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 12, 2022

For all its scuba-diving wizardry, the film’s title is the extent of the detail you’ll get about the kids at its center.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 10, 2022

Avoiding excessively heightened melodrama, Thirteen Lives doesn’t substitute it with much that one couldn’t already find in the copious amount of available coverage of the real-life incident.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 10, 2022

It lacked suspense, tautness, and felt kind of dry.

| Aug 5, 2022

Mr. Howard deploys exciting music, engineers suspenseful twists and delivers emotionally wrenching scenes that build to a grand payoff. In his fifth decade as a filmmaker, he might be Hollywood’s most enthusiastic purveyor of uplifting goodness.

| Aug 5, 2022

The filmmaking itself ultimately comes off more procedural than soaring, but also refreshingly stripped of the cloying or sentimental: a remarkable story torn from true life, and faithfully told.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 5, 2022

Long but not overlong at 147 minutes, “Thirteen Lives” is sober and gripping, with an interest in the drama of men and women at work that wouldn’t be out of place in a Howard Hawks movie.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 5, 2022

A properly entertaining drama that gets across the technical details with great efficiency. A good job of work by a reliable Hollywood professional.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 5, 2022

The heart of the movie is the discussions among the divers and, even more, the scenes in the caves. Simply as a technical achievement, the underground and underwater filming is highly impressive.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 5, 2022

The unquenchable hope, the remarkable resilience, and the cooperation of all involved are a story of uplift and the best that humanity has to offer.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 5, 2022

Howard has a lot of story to tell and there are few directors in Hollywood with such control of classical technique. Even if you’ve seen the excellent documentary from last year, the film is gripping.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 4, 2022

William Nicholson and Howard take the time to create authentic Thai characters and not turn this into another white savior story.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 4, 2022

The cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom uses rain the way film noir uses shadows, creating a gloom that washes over the cast.

| Original Score: B | Aug 4, 2022

Real-life heroes don't come with capes or slow-motion entrances, and neither do the brave men in Howard's grounded, solid telling.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 4, 2022

Like its protagonists, it isn’t flashy but is all business. It gets the job done with a minimum of histrionics, yet a mountain of suspense.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 4, 2022

There are pockets of diffusive heroes everywhere and that means a lack of tautness or through-line. Neither the divers nor kids, government officials nor families and volunteers really come into focus, staying as murky as the miles of submerged cave.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 3, 2022

As scripted, documentary-style fact-based dramas go, it doesn’t get much better than this.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 1, 2022