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Willow

1988

Ron Howard

Warwick Davis, Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Jean Marsh ...

6.8

83,504

Fantasy. Adventure Willow stars Val Kilmer as Madmartigan, a swashbuckling warrior, and Warwick Davis as the title character. In a mythical kingdom, the evil sorceress Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh) plots to kill all infants so that the newborn princess, Elora, will never take over the throne. But a midwife sets the baby adrift in a river, and she is rescued by Willow, a farmer in Nelwyn, a peaceful village of trolls, fairies, and little folk. Willow and ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Desson Thomson The Washington Post	"A would-be adventure of little people, big people, good guys and bad (...) [A] derivative story, and not helped in the least by director Ron Howard's clumsy steering"	NEG
United States	Jane Galbraith Variety	"A sort of 10th-century Star Wars tossed together with a plethora of elements taken from numerous classic fables"	NEU
United States	Janet Maslin The New York Times	"The direction doesn't always keep the action in clear focus (...) Willow, a pleasant but bland character, doesn't often inspire much sentiment, so the film lacks an emotional center"	NEG
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"It is about a journey too far down a road too well-traveled by other movies (...) The characters in 'Willow' are shallow and unexciting (…) Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)"	NEG
United Kingdom	Tom Huddleston Time Out	"[It] contains enough epic action, narrative momentum and spit-and-sawdust pre-CGI special effects to hold the attention (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader	"This is pretty much the Lucas mixture as usual, this time in a Tolkien mode, with everything from the Old Testament to Kurosawa to Disney fed into a blender and turned into wallpaper."	NEG
United States	Alex McLevy AV Club	"It’s quite tonally jarring at times (...) With all the silliness going on, 'Willow' remains a charming, if flawed, fantasy adventure film"	NEU
United Kingdom	Ian Nathan Empire	"'Willow' is not without its charms - the effects are more than special, the set-pieces suitably epic but it just doesn't fulfill the promise of certain other fantasy films (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	NEU
United States	Chris Cabin Slant	"The cast is dutifully game and the Harryhausen-indebted special effects help give the film its faint pulse (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United Kingdom	Dave Aldridge Radio Times	"It's forced, formulaic and sadly lacking in that sense of magic that's at the root of all successful fantasy (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG

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