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Born on the Fourth of July

1989

Oliver Stone

Tom Cruise, Willem Dafoe, Raymond J. Barry, Caroline Kava ...

6.7

21,943

War. Drama Young Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise) eagerly volunteers for the Vietnam War as a teen, but he becomes an embittered veteran when he is paralyzed from the mid-chest down. Deeply in love with his country, Kovic returns to an environment vastly different from the one he left, and struggles before emerging as a brave new voice for the disenchanted.

	Author	Review
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"[Cruise's] performance is so good that the movie lives through it (...) [It] is one of those films that steps correctly in the opening moments and then never steps wrongly (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Vincent Canby The New York Times	"It is a film of enormous visceral power (...) The film is stunning when it is most specific (...) It's the most ambitious nondocumentary film yet made about the entire Vietnam experience"	POS
United States	Desson Thomson The Washington Post	"[Stone] over-emphasizes where he could understate and imitates where he should originate (...) Stone has created a film whose overblown parts add up to far less than the epic whole he had in mind."	NEG
United States	Variety	"A gripping, devastating and telling film about the Vietnam era (...) Stone drenches the picture in visceral reality"	POS
United States	Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader	"[A] linear plot that doesn't allow us to see Kovic's conversion develop with any complexity"	NEG
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"Tom Cruise gives an astounding, deeply felt performance (...) Stone has found in Cruise the ideal actor to anchor the movie with simplicity and strength."	POS
United Kingdom	Hugo Davenport Telegraph	"Oliver Stone's film is the most historically honest of all the celluloid attempts to grapple with Vietnam and its aftermath (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Scott Tobias AV Club	"The film has the operatic sweep Stone intends, finding in Kovic the most potent symbol imaginable for an entire generation."	POS
United States	Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly	"Despite its epic scale, 'Born on the Fourth of July' feels threadbare (...) [It] is so inflated with purpose and 'good intentions' it doesn’t breathe"	NEU
United Kingdom	Barry McIlheney Empire	"A thoroughly moving tale of one man’s extraordinary life (...) Few recent movies have covered so much ground with such aplomb, fewer still have packed such a punch to the heart (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United Kingdom	Colette Maude Time Out	"Its strength stems from the intense depiction of a man stripped of dignity and sexuality as a result of appalling injuries (...) A compelling, elegiac film"	POS

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