Pocahontas strives for Romeo and Juliet-style sentiment, but it is shackled by its own constraints. The lovers can't really rise above the petty jealousies of their elders because, as the film never stops reminding us, the issues aren't petty.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 17, 2024

The Monets, Manets and Degas of the '90s aren't hanging in some urban art museum. They're in Pocahontas -- and they're about as breathtaking as contemporary art gets.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 17, 2024

At times it's possible to forget completely that it's an animated film, for the characters are so real and engaging. But what truly sets the film apart is its great dignity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 17, 2024

The studio has made noise about its bid at enlightenment, as witnessed by its casting of Native Americans... Maybe that is one measure of progress, or maybe it's just the most cravenly shrewd retailing strategy in many, many a moon.

Full Review | Dec 17, 2024

Unfortunately, though luscious to look at and painstakingly rendered, Pocahontas is an unusually joyless affair. The adventurous beauty rejects one suitor because he is too "serious," but this movie barely registers on the humor meter.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 17, 2024

For a film which has been heralded as painstakingly PC, Pocahontas's conscience stretches only to portraying American Indians as human beings which, in 1995, hardly qualifies as a particularly sophisticated perspective.

Full Review | Dec 17, 2024

Pocahontas triumphs when it forgets about patting the kiddies on their heads... When it reaches deep into its makers' imaginations to render concrete the ephemeral ideas and emotions at its core, the film achieves new levels of animated artistry.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 17, 2024

Disney has created the first anti-animation movie, in which all of the fantasy flourishes that worked so well in the past are muted into dirt-brown dull.

Full Review | Dec 17, 2024

You are still left with something fairly meaningless, although it's a pretty enough tale of racial reconciliation.

Full Review | Dec 17, 2024

To dwell on what is "wrong" with Pocahontas is to risk what is missing what is right about it: the lush, intricate score by Alan Menken, who is composing finer music for Disney than anyone is for Broadway these days.

Full Review | Dec 17, 2024

A disappointment with saving graces, the Walt Disney production of Pocahontas proves especially frustrating in imposing slipshod animation upon a smartly written story.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 17, 2024

If you wind up at the new Disney film, keep your chin up. It does have its moments, although the best things tend to be incidental.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 17, 2024

Even if Disney's Pocahontas can be considered a failure in almost every significant respect -- and, regrettably, it can -- it is only in relation to their own, impossibly high standards.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 17, 2024

The landscapes make up for much. All those cataracts and sunsets: all those forests painted like living, breathing Japanese water colors; all those river-viewing crags that characters go to stand on whenever the screenplay runs out of dialogue.

Full Review | Dec 17, 2024

It was a fatal mistake to allow suffocating solemnity to eclipse what might have been a strongly felt story. What ultimately says most about this venture is that its liveliest character is a talking tree.

Full Review | Dec 17, 2024

If Pocahontas had appeared before The Little Mermaid, it would have seemed like a revelation.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 17, 2024

In its own rather stolid way, this does have something for the entire family, no mean achievement these days.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 17, 2024

Its virtuosity effortlessly dances around you. This is truly one of the most purely pleasurable movies to open this year.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 17, 2024

As pure entertainment, it works. Thought it won't be as memorable as The Lion King or Aladdin, it's still prototypical Disney fare.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 17, 2024

With one eye on history and one on the box office, Disney attempts to wrap a conventional fairy tale romance in a cloak of political correctness, and suffocates the life and humor right out of the movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 17, 2024