What maintains The Way We Were through its potential cringes is the realism of the romantic arc and the believable chemistry between the two leads -- equal passion and frustration, at times a perfect romance and others a doomed affair.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 9, 2023

Casting Streisand and Redford was brilliant as they are clearly on opposite ends of the spectrum but have an obvious onscreen chemistry that makes the movie work.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 16, 2023

It's a movie with big sharp teeth but no bite. The mouth opens, the dentures fall out and the story just sits there gaping at its own emptiness.

| Oct 3, 2023

Even if its appeal as a passionate upmarket weepie is not your thing, the film might carry you along with its interest in social history.

| Jan 23, 2023

The Way We Were... is not really a valid title, for so few of us were this way.

| Mar 7, 2022

The Way We Were is a fluke -- a torpedoed ship full of gaping holes that comes snugly into port.

| Jan 20, 2022

The leads are so good (working with a strong script by Arthur Laurents) that the events surrounding their relationship rarely feel as significant.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 2, 2022

Pollack's direction, sure and precise when shooting his stars alone in a room, collapses to the extent that he loses his narrative line.

| Oct 8, 2021

...a slow-moving yet mostly compelling love story...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 28, 2020

The entire picture reeks of prophetic hindsight, whereby the cleverer characters so splendidly predict the future, thanks to the author's writing them years after the fact.

| Jul 23, 2020

While I could not really believe much of what I saw, my eyes never left the screen.

| Oct 2, 2019

For a screen romance with huge movie stars, that sentiment feels pretty real.

| Nov 14, 2018

Redford, as a character seemingly hewn from the pages of F Scott Fitzgerald (he's a writer to boot), is perfectly cast and Streisand is simply Streisand.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 14, 2018

Streisand is capable in an implausible role as a liberated Jewess, and Redford is...well, Redford.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 14, 2018

By, some peculiar alchemy, "The Way We Were" turns into the kind of compromised claptrap that Hubbell is supposed to be making within the film and that we're meant to think is a sellout. It is.

| Nov 14, 2018

The movie has the look of a big Hollywood romantic film but because director Pollack looks corruption in the face and exposes it for what it feels like, The Way We Were emerges as one of the least sentimental love stories ever filmed.

| Oct 17, 2018

Old-fashioned sudser.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 26, 2010

In Pollack's schmaltzy romantic melodrama, real politics is in the background (of course), but the movie is enjoyable as a star vehicle for its handsome stars, Redford and Streisand in their only film together, not to mention Hamlisch's melodic tone.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 29, 2009

The politics are relegated to the background, and what is left is a commercially astute weepie.

| May 26, 2008

An engrossing, if occasionally ludicrous, hit tearjerker with Pollack, Streisand, and Redford doing a good job of bringing Arthur Laurents' script to the screen.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 26, 2008