Steve
Jobs the movie is “astonishingly
brilliant whenever it’s
not breaking your heart,” said
David Ehrlich in TimeOut.com.
Michael Fassbender delivers a
“lightning in a bottle” performance
as the tech visionary,
and Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay
is “even sharper” than the one
that won him an Oscar for The
Social Network. But director Danny Boyle can’t
contain his overzealousness for two-plus hours,
and in the end he “seizes on the one maudlin note
in Sorkin’s script” and closes the picture with “a
wallop of well-meaning schmaltz.” Until then,
it’s “difficult to truly care” about the story being
told, said Benjamin Lee in The
Guardian (U.K.). The movie
focuses on three Apple product
launches that represented crossroads
in Jobs’ life. Each time,
Jobs spars with the same six
characters backstage, including
the ex whose daughter he won’t
initially acknowledge as his
own. But only “diehard iPhone
fetishists” will buy that there’s
ever much at stake behind all the clever dialogue.
To them, the big question remains, Who was Steve
Jobs? said Chris Nashawaty in Entertainment
Weekly. This film, which seems “more interested
in entertainment than enlightenment,” equivocates,
making him “equal parts beautiful mind and bully