YouHeart I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

bandw Most of this movie concentrates on the life of Nobel Prize physicist Richard Feynman (born in 1918), roughly from age twenty to twenty-seven. During this time he got his Ph.D. from Princeton and participated in the Manhattan Project. Also in that time frame he met and married Arline Greenbaum. There are a couple of scenes, with Feynman being around the age of six, that establish his inquiring mind and his relationship with his father, but the main thrust of the movie details the relationship between Richard and Arline.Having read Feynman's books "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" and "What Do You Care What Other people Think," as well as having viewed several of his videos on YouTube, I felt that this movie did not capture what I perceive as Feynman's impishness and openness. Maybe this was because during the time period covered Feynman was dealing not only with his early career challenges but also with the serious health problems of Arline. I thought the movie did a good job of detailing how Feynman coped with the difficult conflict between his professional ambitions and his love and devotion to Arline.I suppose most people's image of the 1940s comes from looking at bleached out color photos and videos from that time. Whoever decided on the lighting for this movie must have been under the impression that that is what things looked like at the time, since there seems to be some sepia-toned cast to much of the film. I suppose the desire was to add some sense of nostalgia for a past era, but I found the rather dark filming fosters an overall fogginess.Feynman's academic career was glossed over with there being little desire to inform the audience as to what his scientific interests were. There was no mention of what his contributions were to the Manhattan Project, or why he was chosen to go to Los Alamos. There was some odd editing like the insertion early on of a hand tossing out small pieces of paper from atop a wooden post. After the atomic blast at Alamogordo there is a scene of Fermi doing some measurements of how the pieces of paper were scattered in order to estimate the power of the blast, but this was not made clear enough for most people to make the appropriate deduction. Also, the movie has Feynman looking at the atomic blast with unaided eyes which would have caused retinal burns.The score tries to be manipulative, but winds up being intrusive. Every time there is a tender moment some sappy music is played.I wish this movie could have given more of a hint of Feynman's being a witty, free-spirited genius, which I think he was.

abhilash-1 I give this movie 9/10, the one mark is deducted because this movie is not the best introduction to Feynman's life and does not do enough justice to his great personality. To fully enjoy the movie you must first read Feynman's two books, "What do you care what other people think?' and 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' The first is essential, the second is optional. Both are light reading type of books with loads of jokes but they have their sensitive side as well. On the whole well balance.Now if you read the book, you will get a good insight into Feynman's personality. Then the movie will be like the frosting on top of your Feynman cake. I wish the director had done a better job, it would have introduced so many more people to the life and works of Richard P. Feynman.

chitowndale This movie is a major disappointment to me. I looked forward to it after listening to many of Richard Feynman's Physics lectures. While doing a great job of showing the love between these two people, it totally misses out on showing Richard as a person unto himself. He is so unique that this is a massive oversight, to say the least. Despite his tragedy, I am sure he was just as irreverent and humorous during the Manhattan project as he was for the rest of his life. Yet only a couple of snippets show this irreverence and humor and even those are done badly. One is the repetitive exiting of the Los Alamos site to demonstrate the lousy security they had despite rigorous examination of everyone entering the site. The other was when he first met with the students in the data processing lab. That one too was far below what I'm sure the real Richard Feynman would have done, judging by how he treated his students in almost all of the lectures I have listened to.So Broderick took a whole person and cut him in half, only showing the intimate portion of his life and relationship with his wife that he loved so dearly. He almost completely left out the public persona of the man and this hurts the movie so badly that it never really recovers from it. It makes it a poor movie when it could have been a great movie, right up there with A Beautiful Mind. That is why I rated it a 3 instead of an 8 or 9 like it could have been.

goblinhairedguy For fans of Feynman's books, this will be a disappointment. Matthew Broderick's performance doesn't capture the fire, playfulness and wonder of Feynman's personality (as do documentaries of his lectures). Furthermore, his direction botches many of the anecdotes, missing the points of emphasis and undermining the quirky humour and sense of irony in the original telling. For example, in the Chinese abacus scene (which is shifted to a much earlier period in Feynman's life), Broderick has Feynman initiate the challenge, whereas in real life, it was the hapless abacus salesman who challenged him, completely unaware that he was taking on a renowned physicist. Therefore, the sense of irony, and of Feinman's idiosyncrasy in the world of mere mortals, is lost. Only Patricia Arquette seems to have captured the essence of the memoirs, despite her often unintelligible dialogue.