Recencies van critici

The movie goes down like a horse pill... Many have already noted that Platt now looks too old to play a teenager, but that’s hardly the movie’s gravest sin. "Dear Evan Hansen," so exquisitely engineered to give us all the feels, is really a story about a megalomaniac in training. Don’t fall for it.

There are enough goosebump-inducing, epiphanic moments courtesy of [Platt] that you see why people might love this film as well as cringe at it. Platt does not ruin the movie. He singlehandedly gives it a voice.

The moment Platt’s soaring vocals are paired with Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s pop rock-infused score and layered lyrics, “Dear Evan Hansen” works its medium-transcending magic.

Sorry, haters, the film isn’t a train wreck. This musical... works better in the theater. But the translation to the screen is smoother than expected... [Stephen Chbosky] has a sensitivity to adolescent angst and carefully navigates a dramatic journey that is unusually complicated for a musical. The film cries out for pruning but the story survives the move into a more realistic realm.

An unmitigated disaster... Almost everything imaginable has gone wrong on the journey from stage to screen, and the result is a film that isn’t even “so bad it’s good,” like some other recent musical movies; mostly, it’s just painful to watch.

When the movie "Dear Evan Hansen" adds dimension to the stage version, it does so by working against the original’s platitudes and giving more weight to its inherent brutality.

Stephen Chbosky badly mishandles the material, resulting in an increasingly frustrating experience in which Evan’s inability to come clean leads to a string of emotional manipulations that sometimes border on cruel.

The better version of "Dear Evan Hansen" would use its grim story as the means to explore the false cheer and heavily synthetic inspiration content of so much contemporary online life... It would critique the culture that not only made Evan Hansen, but that made "Dear Evan Hansen," too. The film had the opportunity to really edit and rethink those matters. But it only does so here and there, in little bits, mostly by further expanding on Evan’s mental health and that, vaguely, of his peers.

The depths of failure here are difficult to overstate, beginning with bringing Platt back to the role he originated on stage despite his age. A choice whose wrongness should have been obvious on sight alone – or a screen test at the very least – but only gets worse given the style of performance.

When it moves away from the music, "Dear Evan Hansen" feels on less certain ground... [The film] gives enjoyable, tuneful voice to important modern-day concerns but lacks the dramatic and cinematic chops to really take flight.