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:
“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)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“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)