If your teen or 'tween is a fan you can certainly go far more wrong than taking them to this light yet reasonably entertaining band.

| Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Sep 18, 2020

"This Is Us" is packed with nonstop energy and cheeky good fun, courtesy of its likable young leads.

| Aug 7, 2018

The film is just plain fun to watch and the music is poppy and quite lovely at times.

| Jun 22, 2018

Unabashedly an upbeat, snazzily shot infomercial that accentuates and overdoes the positives of this well-scrubbed quintet, Us still manages to capture the lads' refreshing ability to remain basically who they were while coping with life-altering changes.

| Original Score: B- | Nov 29, 2017

It smells less like teen spirit than money, yet it bottles the carefree zest of pure pop so irresistably even non-Directioners will find themselves happily bip-bip-bopping along.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 5, 2017

I feel as if I learned very little from One Direction: This is Us, a movie that is more of a consumer product or an event than an actual feature film.

| Original Score: C | Jun 28, 2016

It's hard not to get caught up in the band's infectious enthusiasm for life and drive to make hay while the sun shines.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 7, 2016

The boys are very likable, but the film around them is still very repetitive.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 30, 2014

About as journalistically useful as a promoted tweet.

| Feb 5, 2014

Even Niall's schtick of whipping up or quieting down a mass of waiting fans seems the most innocuous metaphor imaginable for the manipulation that, unexamined here, lies at the hollow heart of all this manufactured stardom and its manufactured followers.

| Dec 27, 2013

What's super-odd about this film is its director, Morgan Spurlock. Best-known as an activist documentarian...it's a bit of a shock to see his controversy-magnet name attached to something so tame, formulaic and corporate.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 29, 2013

Background graphics burst past the stage and into the foreground - a flashy, amusingly distracting gimmick that feels true to the band it accompanies.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 22, 2013

This Is Us is like a balloon - it's shiny and kinda fun for about 10 minutes, but ultimately it's full of nothing.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 20, 2013

One Direction: This Is Us feels like a 90 minute advertisement that has been created to further promote the One Direction brand.

| Original Score: B- | Sep 16, 2013

Perhaps the nicest surprise of the doco is that, despite emerging from the manufactured pop machine, these boys feel refreshingly grounded and they're not taking their success for granted.

| Sep 16, 2013

An inoffensive but shallow cash-in on a temporary phenomenon.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 12, 2013

Fans will eat this stuff up with a spoon, while any stray nonfans will likely spend the movie gauging the bubblegum tunes and matching faces to names. (By the end, I could finally tell bandmates Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson apart.)

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 10, 2013

Like their music, the film proves to be inoffensively genial, if surface-deep.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 9, 2013

One Direction: This Is Us... doesn't bother with bummers, even small ones. Fame, according to this movie, is a journey to the center of radness.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2013

Spurlock, who revolutionized activist documentary filmmaking with Super Size Me, has set the genre back with this cinema equivalent of a glossy teen magazine cover.

| Original Score: 5.7/10 | Sep 5, 2013