HAMILTON is now Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes at 100% - Read the reviews!

HAMILTON is now Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes at 100% - Read the reviews!

The HAMILTON film is now Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a perfect score of 100% based on 48 reviews! Read all the reviews here - updating live throughout the day.

Earlier this week, Disney released exclusive clips from the upcoming film, including a look at the opening number of the show.

 

 

David Rooney, LA Times: Of all the dazzlingly articulated sentiments in "Hamilton," few may sound more incongruous right now than that one - or, paradoxically, more fitting. To be a living, thinking American in 2020, during a health crisis that has claimed thousands of lives and may claim many more, is to experience a strange commingling of relief, horror and guilt. To see a nation protesting (again) the destruction and oppression of Black lives is to be flooded with disorienting bursts of despair and hope. We live in a contradictory moment, and "Hamilton" - a joyous synthesis of popular culture and people's history, a utopian vision of equality set in profoundly unequal times - is nothing if not animated by its own contradictions.

Peter Debruge, Associated Press: In the show, Miranda's line: "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?" was a plea to put Hamilton back into the history books, to reclaim this lost Founding Father. The genius of "Hamilton" is unchanged - how history remembers and changes. But in 2020, the question of how we tell stories has shifted in meaning. Who tells our story? That would be white people - and the show's lens might scramble the deck but it's still about elite, white males. "Hamilton" once asked us to look again at the birth of America, but it's hard not to think that it may soon face its own kind of reckoning.

 

 

Chris Jones,  Salt Lake Tribune: By capturing the play as performed, the movie gets so many details that would be otherwise lost: the physical comedy when Miranda's Hamilton challenges a hapless orator to a debate; the swagger when Hamilton and Burr consider which Schuyler sister each might seduce; or the practical split-screen of Hamilton and Burr each contemplating new fatherhood during the lullaby "Dear Theodosia." Through the close-ups, Kail neatly dissects the play's trickiest numbers, like the Act I finale "Non-Stop," to weave through multiple characters without interrupting the flow of music and movement. The onstage camerawork also captures the sly dealing Hamilton must engage in in "The Room Where It Happens," Jackson's soulful gravity as Washington, and even the spittle coming out of the mouth of mad King George III (Jonathan Groff).

Richard Roeper, Newday: The movie ably captures everything that has made the play so highly acclaimed, from the rhythmic hip-hop dialogue that resonates like 21st-Century Shakespeare to the delightful cognitive dissonance of watching actors of color play ultra-white Americans. Miranda shines as Hamilton, a man of high ambition (if not infallible judgment) determined to play a part in an unpredictable experiment called America. Leslie Odom, Jr. i terrific as Aaron Burr - the cautious Salieri to Hamilton's bold Mozart - while Daveed Diggs nearly steals the show as a cocky Thomas Jefferson in a purple frock coat (think Prince as a Founding Father). Phillipa Soo, as Hamilton's wife, Eliza, gives the show an emotional center that helps it from becoming solely a clever retelling of history.

 

 

Linda Holmes, The Wrap: This production carries the distinct advantage of the unique talents of the show's original cast, many of whom had worked with Miranda before and whose individual skills were shown to great advantage. Phillipa Soo and Renée Elise Goldsberry are superb as the Schuyler sisters, who both fall for Hamilton (in memorably harmonic ballads). Daveed Diggs has a flair for comedic energy in his dual roles as Marquis de Lafayette and a slightly ridiculous Thomas Jefferson. Jonathan Groff, the rare white actor in the cast, nearly steals the show as England's King George III, whose bouncy British-pop numbers hilariously evoke royal hauteur.

Roger Friedman, Washington Post: Filmed theater inevitably loses something in the translation: that electric sense of human energy, the ineffable appeal that actors make, as they reach out to you, and seemingly only you, beseeching your eye and your approval. But Kail, who won a Tony for his direction of the Broadway production, finds other means of expressing the intensity of the "Hamilton" experience, through close-ups and overhead shots and a camera moving through ensemble numbers like a rush-hour rider through a turnstile. (Kail supplemented the live footage with onstage cameras when there was no audience present.)

 

 

A.O. Scott, The Wrap: "Hamilton" was filmed on the stage of the Broadway theater where it played; most of it was shot with an audience in the seats, though several songs were also filmed in an empty theater. It is a document of the stage show rather than an adaptation of it - a safer way to approach a sacred property like "Hamilton," and one that fits on the Disney+ TV format, but also one that can't transcend its origins.

Johnnny Oleksinski, USA Today: Every character has a vibrant quality. Imagine James Brown as Thomas Jefferson - that's the showboating take created by Daveed Diggs, who also manages to imbue a second character, Marquis de Lafayette, with authentic rhyme-spitting soul. Leslie Odom Jr. makes Hamilton's rival and frenemy Aaron Burr an antagonist you care as much about as Hamilton himself. Every time the Schuyler sisters (Phillipa Soo, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Jasmine Sephas Jones) appear, it's a showstopper. "You'll Be Back," a "love" song by the irked and flamboyant King George (Jonathan Groff) to the rebellious American colonists, is the peppy and psychotic showtune you never knew you needed in your life.

 

 

A.O. Scott, New York Times: The opening scenes of the filmed version of the Broadway musical "Hamilton," which starts streaming on Disney Plus on Independence Day weekend, pull you back in time to two distinct periods. The people onstage, in their breeches and brass-buttoned coats, belong to the New York of 1776. That's when a 19-year-old freshly arrived from the Caribbean - the "bastard, immigrant, son of a whore" who shares his name with the show - makes his move and takes his shot, joining up with a squad of anti-British revolutionaries and eventually finding his way to George Washington's right hand and the front of the $10 bill.