60
Much like the technology in the title, "A Hologram for the King" flickers in and out of focus — sharp at times, but ultimately lacking resolution.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
Tykwer sublimates what Eggers made explicit: the joblessness, the debt, the isolation. He knows the power of an image, a gesture, a brief exchange, so he captures those social themes in flashes, which ironically gives them new power.
38
Slant Magazine by Christopher Gray
Remarkably faithful, except in how it rather boldly transforms Dave Eggers's drama into a broad comedy.
58
A Hologram For the King never congeals into a single, involving story.
60
A Hologram for the King arrives at its feel-good conclusion honestly enough, but its cultural engagement feels tentative, even secondhand: The movie conjures no shortage of potent images, but push a bit deeper and your fist closes on empty air.
50
The Playlist by Kenji Fujishima
Hanks brings to Clay a nervous energy, a sense of desperation to even his most outwardly optimistic of gestures, that nevertheless always seems tempered by a more sober inner awareness of his own failures. It’s a remarkable performance in a film that is unworthy of it.
40
Tom Tykwer’s adaptation is a meandering mess of half-baked storylines that amount to little. Hanks’s affable presence keeps it all afloat.
88
Chicago Sun-Times by Richard Roeper
Writer-director Tom Tykwer is clearly a fan of the source material, and he has done an admirable job of taking a melancholy, beautifully rendered piece of prose and catapulting it to visual life.
60
The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden
When it isn’t trying too hard to be instructive or jokey, Tykwer’s film fluently conveys the hard truth of diminished relevance, geopolitical as well as personal. Hanks’ portrayal of a man caught between utter defeat and a yearning to begin again is pitch-perfect.
50
Screen International by Tim Grierson
As thoughtfully rendered as much of Hologram is, the film eventually succumbs to the material’s fundamental triteness, offering done-to-death life lessons about second chances and the value of broadening one’s perspective.