TV Guide Magazine

Hope and Glory is a wonderful film, an intelligent, heartfelt, personal, and marvelously entertaining look at what it was like to grow up in wartorn England.

Washington Post by Rita Kempley

Hope and Glory is so enjoyable you want it to be a 16-part mini-series. When it's over, you sit staring at the credits, as you would the last page of a good book, wishing for another chapter.

Chicago Tribune by Dave Kehr

It's a rich, funny, bracing film, one of Boorman's finest.[06 Nov 1987, p.41]

TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)

Hope and Glory is a wonderful film, an intelligent, heartfelt, personal, and marvelously entertaining look at what it was like to grow up in wartorn England.

Time Out

Boorman's autobiographical film about family life during the Blitz is subversively light on the blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice, and a joy throughout.

The New Yorker by Pauline Kael

The movie is wonderfully free of bellyaching; it's a large-scale comic vision, with 90-foot barrage balloons as part of the party atmosphere.

The New York Times by Janet Maslin

Hope and Glory has an invitingly nostalgic spirit and a fine eye for the magical details that a little boy might notice.

Washington Post by Desson Thomson

John Boorman's childhood and the London Blitz happened to coincide. Which is great for the movie Hope and Glory, because he turns both events into exquisite myth.

Los Angeles Times

In his brilliantly evocative and warmly comic Hope and Glory, John Boorman shifts the point of view downward, away from the tense and preoccupied adults, to that of a sweetly thoughtful 7-year-old boy, to whom the war is something else entirely. [30 Oct 1987, p.1]

Time Out by Staff (Not Credited)

Boorman's autobiographical film about family life during the Blitz is subversively light on the blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice, and a joy throughout.

Miami Herald by Bill Cosford

Unlikely as it seems, considering the source, Hope and Glory may be John Boorman's most affecting film. It is surely his most entertaining. [27 Nov 1987, p.D1]

Variety

Essentially a collection of sweetly autobiographical anecdotes of English family life during World War II.

Variety by Staff (Not Credited)

Essentially a collection of sweetly autobiographical anecdotes of English family life during World War II.

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

At the same time that Boorman seduces us with such enchantments, he also deceives us with a crafty little googly of his own--persuading us that he is embarking on a fresh adventure while aiming straight for the heart of old-fashioned English cinema.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

There is something almost perverse in the way Boorman defines his point of view. He is not concerned in this film about the tragedy of war, or the meaning of war, but only with the specific experience of war for a grade-school boy. Drawing from his autobiographical memories, he has not given the little boy in the movie any more insights than such a little boy should have.

Empire by William Thomas

Appealing, emotional and with a strong enough performance by Rice-Edwards as the boy in his own little war-free world.