Reception
| Professional reviews | |
|---|---|
| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | (61/100) |
| Rotten Tomatoes | (80%) |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmovie | |
| Entertainment Weekly | (A−) |
| Roger Ebert | |
| ReelViews | |
| Empire | |
| Total Film | |
| Film4 | |
The film received positive reviews from critics with an 80% "Certified Fresh" approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert gave the film 3 and a half stars out of four, writing "The film is a shade over three hours long. I appreciated the extra time, which allows us to feel the passage of prison months and years."
Forbes commentator Dawn Mendez referred to the character of John Coffey as a "'magic Negro' figure"—a term coined by Spike Lee to describe a stereotypical fictional black person depicted in a fictional work as a "saintly, nonthreatening" person whose purpose in life is to solve a problem for or otherwise further the happiness of a white person. Lee himself berated the character as one of several "super-duper, magical Negro" depicting a skewed version of the black male, claiming it was due to the prominence of white decision makers in the media companies.
Read more about this topic: The Green Mile (film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)