This outwardly gloomy movie is as gentle and pleasant a film as we’re likely to get from a major studio this year.

| Original Score: B | Sep 2, 2022

Wonder Boys reminds us that life is about putting one sentence after another, knowing when to start the next chapter, and realizing when it's time to discard your progress altogether and start something new.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 17, 2022

Classy but listless existential privilege.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 16, 2021

A silly, anodyne, and terribly absurd comedy drama, packed with characters as flat as a freshly printed blank sheet. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/10 | Jan 30, 2021

This is probably my favorite comedy of the past twenty years.

| Nov 27, 2018

This grand mess of a movie has many pleasures.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 29, 2010

Like a favorite novel, "Wonder Boys" gets more comfortably broken-in with each return, and Michael Douglas wears Grady Tripp's scruffiness as sharply as he does Gordon Gekko's natty clothes - addressing jealousy, panic and terror in creative complacency.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 15, 2010

One of those films where the term 'character study' is used to excuse the fact that there's nothing of real interest in the story.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 27, 2009

If Douglas and Hanson have aimed to make Grady as simultaneously weary and jazzed...as Bob Dylan's Oscar-winning theme song is, they have come enticingly close, with marvelous highs along the way (not just the narcotic kind), but they haven't fully got th

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 1, 2009

Writer Steven Kloves and director Curtis Hanson turn Michael Chabon's novel into a quirky goofball pleasure.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 7, 2008

Michael Douglas gives the best perfromance of his career (to be remembered at Oscar time) in this screwball comedy about a college professor who's pushed into maturity by forces beyond his control; a well-acted coming-of-age saga for adults.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Apr 5, 2007

As Tripp, Michael Douglas, looking hugely disheveled, does his best work in years; playing a real character after so many pictures in which he's glided by on an air of silken yuppiness, he proves that he's still a true actor.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 24, 2006

...smart, charming, and funny ... It's about finding the right inspiration and making the right choices. Hanson and Kloves, it's abundantly clear, made a lot of right choices.

| Apr 8, 2006

Wonder Boys digresses so entertainingly, you forget how quickly Grady got into the mess he's in, and can't imagine where we might be headed.

| Jan 26, 2006

Don't let the lame marketing for this film turn you off, this film is surprisingly enjoyable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2005

I've never quite seen a movie like Wonder Boys. It is sometimes self-deprecating, often nostalgic and optimistic, but always slightly mysterious.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 1, 2005

Veterans and relative newcomers populate the talented cast, led by Douglas in one of his best-rendered performances to date.

| Original Score: A- | Apr 9, 2005

Wonder Boys has a delightfully malicious beginning, an increasingly muddled second act and a conclusion of such moral uplift that it probably should not be shown to the characters themselves.

Full Review | Mar 3, 2005

This performance shows Douglas aging gracefully and willingly, an accomplishment that only a couple of famous leading men have achieved in recent years.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 6, 2004

There's a story there, but it's probably not very interesting.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 20, 2003