The Glass Castle

"It wants you to know that all this more or less really did happen; it also can't help but attempt to tie an emotional bow around the messiness of real life, and to offer a heartwarming thesis about a childhood that was clearly full of contradictions."

"Cretton captures the incidents of Walls' childhood (too many of them, to be honest, as the film really ought to be half an hour shorter), but struggles to connect them to the grown woman Larson plays in the present."

"Reflective and cumulatively poignant, Destin Cretton's The Glass Castle lays bare the utmost truth about families: You will eventually morph into your parents."

"Jeannette, the central voice and consciousness in the book, is an oddly blurred character on screen. And the film itself loses focus as it drifts toward the conventions of the coming-of-age story and the family-dysfunction melodrama."

"A number of sequences in the story ... feel inevitable rather than organic."

"Harrelson ... thoroughly understands Rex from the inside, immersing himself in the role of this charismatic man in a way that allows us to see both how compelling and how dangerous a parent he was."

"Whatever its imbalances and flaws, the movie is sure to strike an emotional chord with the book's many fans as well as newcomers to the remarkable tale."