The Nativity Story Critic Reviews

Unfolds in a scrupulously accurate historical adventure story that depicts the world of Jesus' birth with an exciting you-are-there verisimilitude.Read the full review

By grounding everything that went before in an earthy realism, Hardwicke earns the elevation of the nativity sequence, one of the more beautiful scenes in this year's cinema.Read the full review

At its best, The Nativity Story shares with "Hail Mary" an interest in finding a kernel of realism in the old story of a pregnant teenager in hard times. Buried in the pageantry, in other words, is an interesting movie.Read the full review

In a real sense, Nativity Story is the female other to Gibson's "Passion": Dedicated to life rather than death, it's suffused with a sense of the womanly divine.Read the full review

A filmed Sunday-school lesson that favors a dry, by-the-Book approach over even a suggestion of dramatic interpretation. It's more Christmas pageant than movie.Read the full review

This drab exercise in glum piety slumps where it should soar, sapping the story of its mystery and transcendence with an overriding sense of literality.Read the full review

This is not a chance to "experience the most timeless of stories as you've never seen it before" but just the opposite: an opportunity, for those who want it, to encounter this story exactly the way it's almost always been told.Read the full review

Memories of dreary Sunday school classes come flooding back courtesy of The Nativity Story.Read the full review

As a piece of religious instruction or an animated version of a crèche, it accomplishes its aims. As a movie, however, it's slow, plodding, and not terribly interesting.Read the full review