61
Metascore
11 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- Laurents' screenplay has a shocking sense of character truth, and The Way We Were says things that no one else has dared to say in a major Hollywood movie.
- This tear-jerkiest of rom-coms about a couple struggling through fundamental differences will hit you right in the feels.
- 75Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertEssentially just a love story, and not sturdy enough to carry the burden of both radical politics and a bittersweet ending.
- 75TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazineAn engrossing, if occasionally ludicrous, hit tearjerker with Pollack, Streisand, and Redford doing a good job of bringing Arthur Laurents' script to the screen.
- 67The A.V. ClubJesse HassengerThe A.V. ClubJesse HassengerRedford and Streisand are the whole show, so scenes with various supporting characters drag. But Pollack’s film still manages to function as a glossy rebuke to the Hollywood standard of the unlikely romance.
- 60EmpireWilliam ThomasEmpireWilliam ThomasIt all adds up to just another glossy Love Story.
- 60Time OutTime OutWith the script glossing whole areas of confrontation (from the communist '30s to the McCarthy witch-hunts), it often passes into the haze of a nostalgic fashion parade.
- 60Chicago ReaderChicago ReaderA film about marriage that works reasonably well as a star vehicle for Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, but fails resoundingly as the caustic social comment director Sydney Pollack and writer Arthur Laurents obviously intended.
- 50A distended, talky, redundant and moody melodrama, combining young love, relentless 1930s and 1940s nostalgia, and spiced artifically with Hollywood Red-hunt pellets. The major positive achievement is Barbra Streisand's superior dramatic versatility, but Robert Redford has too little to work with in the script.
- 40The New York TimesVincent CanbyThe New York TimesVincent CanbyBy, some peculiar alchemy, The Way We Were turns into the kind of compromised claptrap that Hubbell is supposed to be making within the film and that we're meant to think is a sellout. It is.