movie reviews forrest gump

Forrest Gump

I've never met anyone like Forrest Gump in a movie before, and for that matter I've never seen a movie quite like "Forrest Gump." Any attempt to describe him will risk making the movie seem more conventional than it is, but let me try. It's a comedy, I guess. Or maybe a drama. Or a dream.

The screenplay by Eric Roth has the complexity of modern fiction, not the formulas of modern movies. Its hero, played by Tom Hanks , is a thoroughly decent man with an IQ of 75, who manages between the 1950s and the 1980s to become involved in every major event in American history. And he survives them all with only honesty and niceness as his shields.

And yet this is not a heartwarming story about a mentally challenged man. That cubbyhole is much too small and limiting for Forrest Gump. The movie is more of a meditation on our times, as seen through the eyes of a man who lacks cynicism and takes things for exactly what they are. Watch him carefully and you will understand why some people are criticized for being "too clever by half." Forrest is clever by just exactly enough.

Tom Hanks may be the only actor who could have played the role.

I can't think of anyone else as Gump, after seeing how Hanks makes him into a person so dignified, so straight-ahead. The performance is a breathtaking balancing act between comedy and sadness, in a story rich in big laughs and quiet truths.

Forrest is born to an Alabama boardinghouse owner ( Sally Field ) who tries to correct his posture by making him wear braces, but who never criticizes his mind. When Forrest is called "stupid," his mother tells him, "Stupid is as stupid does," and Forrest turns out to be incapable of doing anything less than profound. Also, when the braces finally fall from his legs, it turns out he can run like the wind.

That's how he gets a college football scholarship, in a life story that eventually becomes a running gag about his good luck. Gump the football hero becomes Gump the Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam, and then Gump the Ping-Pong champion, Gump the shrimp boat captain, Gump the millionaire stockholder (he gets shares in a new "fruit company" named Apple Computer), and Gump the man who runs across America and then retraces his steps.

It could be argued that with his IQ of 75 Forrest does not quite understand everything that happens to him. Not so. He understands everything he needs to know, and the rest, the movie suggests, is just surplus. He even understands everything that's important about love, although Jenny, the girl he falls in love with in grade school and never falls out of love with, tells him, "Forrest, you don't know what love is." She is a stripper by that time.

The movie is ingenious in taking Forrest on his tour of recent American history. The director, Robert Zemeckis , is experienced with the magic that special effects can do (his credits include the "Back To The Future" movies and " Who Framed Roger Rabbit "), and here he uses computerized visual legerdemain to place Gump in historic situations with actual people.

Forrest stands next to the schoolhouse door with George Wallace , he teaches Elvis how to swivel his hips, he visits the White House three times, he's on the Dick Cavett show with John Lennon , and in a sequence that will have you rubbing your eyes with its realism, he addresses a Vietnam-era peace rally on the Mall in Washington. Special effects are also used in creating the character of Forrest's Vietnam friend Lt. Dan ( Gary Sinise ), a Ron Kovic type who quite convincingly loses his legs.

Using carefully selected TV clips and dubbed voices, Zemeckis is able to create some hilarious moments, as when LBJ examines the wound in what Forrest describes as "my butt-ox." And the biggest laugh in the movie comes after Nixon inquires where Forrest is staying in Washington, and then recommends the Watergate. (That's not the laugh, just the setup.) As Forrest's life becomes a guided tour of straight-arrow America, Jenny (played by Robin Wright ) goes on a parallel tour of the counterculture. She goes to California, of course, and drops out, tunes in, and turns on. She's into psychedelics and flower power, antiwar rallies and love-ins, drugs and needles. Eventually it becomes clear that between them Forrest and Jenny have covered all of the landmarks of our recent cultural history, and the accommodation they arrive at in the end is like a dream of reconciliation for our society. What a magical movie.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Robin Wright as Jenny Curran
• Gary Sinise as Lt. Dan
• Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump

Directed by

• Robert Zemeckis

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Show Business: The World According to Gump

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You see them — folks of all ages and both sexes — floating out of the movie theater on waves of honorable sentiment. The kids look thoughtful, the grownups wistful. Couples are holding hands. This is not a Speed crowd; these people haven’t just exited a roller-coaster movie — they’ve completed an upbeat encounter session with America’s recent past. No question: one more audience has been Gumped.

Forrest Gump , a romantic epic starring Tom Hanks as a slow but sweet-souled Alabama boy who lucks into nearly every headline event of the past 40 years, is the summer sensation: a popular hit and an instant cultural touchstone. As the film’s director, Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit), says, Gump has “no typical storytelling devices: no villain, no ticking clock, no burning fuse.” Yet it has exploded at the North American box office. In its second week of release, when ticket sales for even the most robust hits drop perhaps 20%, Gump held even. This past weekend it reached the $100 million mark; an industry savant predicts, quite conservatively, that it will finally earn $165 million.

Gump has warmed the collective heart of moviegoers; they spread the word, command their friends to go. They storm music stores for the two-CD album, featuring 32 songs from the rock era. They snap up copies of Winston Groom’s 1986 novel, on which the film was based, and copies of Gumpisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump , a pocket-size book of aphorisms from the novel. Then they run back to the theater to relive the experience. “It makes you look at things in a better way than you used to,” says W. Bart Edwards, a Gainsville, Florida, psychiatrist who worked in a veterans’ hospital and sees the film as a salve for Vietnam survivors. “It’s like a happy tear-jerking.”

Vietnam is just one nightmare in Forrest’s odd odyssey. Born with a 75 IQ and deemed an embarrassment by everyone except his loving mother (Sally Field), the boy discovers two things: he can run like a gale-force wind, and he will always love his neighbor Jenny (Robin Wright). He goes to war with one friend, a young black man (Mykelti Williamson) dreaming of shrimp boats, and comes home with another, career soldier Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise). And wherever he is, he bumps into famous people: George Wallace and Richard Nixon, J.F.K. and L.B.J., Elvis and John Lennon (all integrated onscreen with Hanks through ingenious special effects). Almost everyone Forrest knows dies. He survives, through his goodness and the miracle of idiot grace.

“I don’t want to sound like a bad version of ‘the child within,”‘ says co- producer Wendy Finerman, who discovered the novel in galleys nine years ago and nurtured the film to fruition. “But the childlike innocence of Forrest Gump is what we all once had. It’s an emotional journey. You laugh and cry. It does what movies are suppose to do: make you feel alive.”

The movie does that. It is a smart, affecting, easygoing fable with plenty of talent on both sides of the camera. The key ingredient is Hanks, the one actor whom the mass audience trusts as an exemplar of quality. He can sell a tough subject to tough customers because they know the film will not be so much about issues as about the decency with which his character faces up to them. That goes for Gump. “The film is nonpolitical,” Hanks says, “and thus nonjudgmental. It doesn’t just celebrate survival, it celebrates the struggle.”

Classically trained and sitcom-bred, Hanks knows that the starkest drama can always use a leavening of wit. For most of the film, he underplays Forrest’s reactions at a level somewhere between a fretful deadpan and the rural slyness of the early Andy Griffith. So when he releases his feelings at the end (when questions of fatherhood and family traits are involved), the scene gushes like a geyser.

So does the audience. “I want to stand up and yell, ‘Go, Gump, go!”‘ says Chris Jackson, a Chicago bartender. “I sat there with tears dripping down my face.” This is the common testimony: cheering and tearing. “People cheered at our audience-research sessions,” says Finerman, “so we knew we had something. What amazed us was that all four quadrants — older men and women, younger men and women — wanted to see it.” That’s another clue to Gumpmania: it’s a movie that makes grown men cry. From I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang to Field of Dreams, the male weepie has been a dependable genre. And Gump, to its credit, is not one of those cry-by-night (but you hate yourself in the morning) exercises in emotional blackmail. It’s fairly honorable about picking your heart’s pocket.

That must be what attracted Finerman, whose eight-year crusade to make this movie is already a Hollywood legend. In retrospect, though, Forrest Gump seems a can’t-miss proposition. Consider that the only three movies of the past two decades to win both the year’s box-office crown and the Oscar for Best Picture — Rocky, Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man — were canny, poignant fables of men in domestic crisis. Throw in two other high-grossing Oscar winners, Platoon and Terms of Endearment, and you have the recipe for a “mature,” feel-good smash. Let’s see: retarded man, family man, Vietnam hero and lots of decent folks on their deathbeds. The movie is not only a greatest-hits rendering of 25 years of Americana, it’s a distillation of humanist culture in commercial movies.

It is also a sleek Hollywoodizing, a ruthlessly canny face-lift of Groom’s novel. In the book, Forrest was just as naive but not quite so innocent or lucky: he had some sex, did some drugs and missed out on the nuclear family that in the movie Forrest finally gets to tend. In pumping up Jenny’s role, screenwriter Eric Roth transferred all of Forrest’s flaws — and most of the excesses Americans committed in the ’60s and ’70s to her. Wright’s Jenny is a frail soul in tailspin, a battered child in a beautiful woman’s body. And Forrest is her redeemer. The suspense of the movie is whether she will allow him to save her.

Zemeckis says, without apparent irony: “I imagined Norman Rockwell painting the baby boomers.” And that is Gump : a social tragedy sanitized for a Saturday Evening Post cover. It celebrates innocence, acceptance and, not least, good manners in a tale set in the very era when Americans were supposed to have misplaced these virtues. The movie offers a cheerful alternative history — a Golden Book version — of the Vietnam War: it’s all about the emotional triumphs of these nice American soldiers, and hardly a Vietnamese even appears. There are precious few villains: only the boys who throw rocks at young Gump, Jenny’s sexually abusive father and the SDS leader who slaps her around. Everyone else is either a celebrity or a victim.

For younger viewers, then, Forrest Gump serves as a gentle introduction to the ’60s: baptism not by fire but by sound track. And to those who raged, suffered or sinned through that insane decade, the movie offers absolution with a love pat. Whaddaya know? We waged a stupid war that destroyed both another country and the best part of ourselves; we tore up our streets and our psyches in a kind of Cultural Revolution; we practically killed ourselves with drugs — and it turns out we’re not guilty. By allowing us to relive all the evils of recent history through invulnerably innocent, uncontaminated Forrest, the movie lets us achieve a vicarious virtue.Thank you, Forrest Gump . We feel so much better.

“Filmmakers often say the American public doesn’t want complicated films full of thought,” says Field, who is outstanding as the heroic mom in this edgy valentine. “They are wrong. They underestimate the intelligence of the American audience.” But does Forrest Gump make you think? No, it makes you feel — or, at best, makes you think about what you feel, and about how long it has been since a movie found those remote corners of sympathy and sentiment.

From a film industry that softens virtually any contentious social issue — aids, the Holocaust, Vietnam — into a fable with a happy ending, Forrest is the ultimate sentimental figure. He embodies that noble Hollywood precept, the spiritual superiority of the handicapped. Forrest is not the ranter on the subway or the sullen, overgrown lad at the back of the class. He is — well, just who is he?

The neat trick about Forrest is he can symbolize so many people. New York Times columnist Frank Rich has compared him to Bill Clinton. But Forrest’s simple optimism and his success as an entrepreneur and a reviver of American confidence could make him an emblem of ’80s conservatism: not only Reaganomics but what Republicans might call Reaganethics. He’s E.T. with a little Gandhi thrown in. He’s Candide making the best of the worst of all possible worlds. And in his influence on events, from the capture of the Watergate burglars to John Lennon’s composition of the song Imagine, he seems almost omnipotent. All-innocent and all-powerful, the ideal guru for the nervous ’90s: Forrest God.

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Forrest Gump Reviews

Flaws and all, the movie unfolds like a book of short stories and that choice ushered in a confidence the script is able to pull off.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 8, 2024

When analyzing the ultimate endurance that “Forrest Gump” has left in the decades since it first came out, it’s obvious that approaching it with a more inquisitive perspective leaves it with a much shallower impact than it did upon its initial release.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Nov 7, 2024

Forrest Gump is Hollywood film-making at its most corn-fed, sucrose-enriched and calorific; you’ll need a sweet tooth for it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 16, 2024

Forrest was an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 3, 2024

Zemeckis has made a fast movie about a slow hero; he transforms Forrest's daffy misconceptions into lyrical flights. Forrest Gump has a softer, more delicate touch and a richer current of feeling than any of the other holy-innocent movies.

Full Review | Mar 1, 2024

What makes Forrest Gump a stunning triumph, a departure from the mediocre norm? A big reason is the way the film provides a fresh perspective on the familiar experience, through the eyes of its unforgettable protagonist.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 1, 2024

Forrest Gump isn't a movie for cynics. Instead, it's one of those rare films that seduces viewers into overlooking its faults with the sheer goodness of its heart.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Mar 1, 2024

Hanks' performance [is] a triumph of dignity, decency, and warm-hearted humor... Even more than his Oscar-winning achievement in Philadelphia, this is a role that will be remembered as long as people care about great acting.

Forrest Gump is a very fine hour for everybody involved. And it's concrete evidence that Tom Hanks is the best actor working in American film today.

Forrest Gump is for big kids what playing Nintendo is for little ones -- that is, the neato thing about Robert Zemeckis' film is the clever techno-wizardry produced by Ken Ralston and Industrial Light and Magic.

Hanks never strikes a false note, never panders to his mentally slow character nor tries to make him more than he is, despite a script that occasionally calls on him to utter what presumably are intended to be simple profundities.

There's an undeniable kick to the idea of recapitulating to the Boomerography as a tale told by an idiot, but the thrill inexorably fades.

Intended as a paean to simplicity and a meditation on the quirks of destiny, "Gump" is instead simple-minded and calculated, a cloying, reactionary fable in praise of stupidity.

Forrest Gump is about as good as Hollywood movies get.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 1, 2024

Hanks' immersion in character and his convincing interaction with fellow players make Forrest Gump -- gimmicks and all -- a pleasure.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 1, 2024

The best art takes the biggest chances, thereby losing people who can't stretch with it. Forrest Gump is worth the effort.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 1, 2024

Forrest Gump is going to touch a lot of people's lives. It also has a good shot at bringing Tom Hanks a second Oscar for best actor.

Loosely adapted from Winston Groom's satirical novel, Forrest Gump provides an incredibly rich and daffy historical pastiche.

Forrest Gump is a rare treat: a movie that delivers a message of hope and faith without delving into preachiness. Much of that success is due to Hanks' majestically deadpan performance.

It turns tedious toward the end... But when it's good, it's very good, and the way it blends star Tom Hanks, who plays the title character, into actual historical film footage will tickle you to no end.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 1, 2024

• Cast & crew
• User reviews
• Forrest Gump

The history of the United States from the 1950s to the '70s unfolds from the perspective of an Alabama man with an IQ of 75, who yearns to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart. The history of the United States from the 1950s to the '70s unfolds from the perspective of an Alabama man with an IQ of 75, who yearns to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart. The history of the United States from the 1950s to the '70s unfolds from the perspective of an Alabama man with an IQ of 75, who yearns to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart.

• Robert Zemeckis
• Winston Groom
• Robin Wright
• Gary Sinise
• 3.3K User reviews
• 118 Critic reviews
• 82 Metascore
• 51 wins & 74 nominations total

Top cast 99+

• Jenny Curran

• Lieutenant Dan Taylor

• Nurse at Park Bench

• Young Forrest
• (as Harold Herthum)

• Elderly Woman
• Elderly Woman's Daughter
• Southern Gentleman …

• Young Elvis Presley

• School Bus Driver
• (as Siobhan J. Fallon)
• School Bus Boy
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Can You Imagine 'Forrest Gump' Without Tom Hanks?

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• Trivia When Forrest gets up to talk at the Vietnam rally in Washington, the microphone plug is pulled and you cannot hear him. According to Tom Hanks he said, "Sometimes when people go to Vietnam, they go home to their mommas without any legs. Sometimes they don't go home at all. That's a bad thing. That's all I have to say about that."
• Goofs When Forrest is given his discharge papers, he sets down his ping-pong paddle and (computerized) ball to salute the officer. When he picks the paddle back up, he also pretends to pick up the ball, which didn't end up getting animated.

Jenny Curran : Do you ever dream, Forrest, about who you're gonna be?

Forrest Gump : Who I'm gonna be?

Jenny Curran : Yeah.

Forrest Gump : Aren't-aren't I going to be me?

• Alternate versions In the TBS and the ABC version, the line at the end of the dorm scene is cut, "I think I ruined your roommate's bath robe".
• Connections Edited from The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Soundtracks Lovesick Blues Written by Cliff Friend and Irving Mills Performed by Hank Williams Courtesy of PolyGram Special Markets

User reviews 3.3K

The role of innocence in positive thinking and thus success ....

• Dec 21, 2012
• How long is Forrest Gump? Powered by Alexa
• Who is the man with the "flag shirt" that says the F word a lot?
• What is Forrest Gump about?
• Why did Jenny leave Forrest before he went on the long run?
• July 6, 1994 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official Instagram
• Forrest Gamp
• Chippewa Square, Savannah, Georgia, USA (bus stop bench)
• Paramount Pictures
• The Steve Tisch Company
• Wendy Finerman Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $55,000,000 (estimated)
• $330,455,270
• $24,450,602
• Jul 10, 1994
• $678,226,465
• Runtime 2 hours 22 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Atmos

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‘forrest gump’: thr’s 1994 review.

On July 6, 1994, Paramount unveiled the Robert Zemeckis film in theaters.

By Duane Byrge

Duane Byrge

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On July 6, 1994, Paramount unveiled Robert Zemeckis ‘ Forrest Gump in theaters. The Tom Hanks satire would go on to win six Oscars at the 67th Academy Awards, including best picture. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below:

Forrest Gump is not stupid. Although his IQ is 75, he sees the world far clearer than most. Through his decent, childlike eyes, we too see things in a less confused and muddled way. In this cheerfully straight-arrow moral tale, Tom Hanks stars as the “wise fool” Forrest Gump and delivers yet another Oscar-level performance. Paramount will win sensational box office with this Robert Zemeckis-directed  film.

Raised in the ‘ 50s in rural Alabama by a single mother (Sally Field), Forrest, being “different,” must fend for himself, struggling against not only perceived expectations but boyhood bullies. He unwittingly finds that he’s blessed with a talent — he can run like the wind, which wins him a football scholarship to play for Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama. And there’s no stopping him after that.

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An uplifting saga about one young boy’s earnest and good-natured attempts to overcome his disabilities, Forrest Gump is also a cheeky social satire of the past 40 years of U.S. social-political history. Eric Roth’s screenplay, adapted from Winston Groom’s novel, nimbly intertwines Forrest’s life with the seminal social events and players of the past several decades. Unassuming Forrest, with his golly-gee enthusiasm and inbred decency, encounters the likes of Elvis, George Wallace, presidents Kennedy through Nixon, Dick Cavett , John Lennon and Abbie Hoffman as he graduates from ‘ Bama , fights in Vietnam, competes in international ping-pong, founds a shrimping company, engages in philanthropy and jogs cross-country.

Contrasting Forrest’s unassuming innocence with the upheavals and rancor of the times, the film is a wisely goofy commentary on the stupidity of smartness.

While Forrest’s foray’s into the dens of the big and powerful are cheekily amusing, the film ambles along over a deeper, darker layer: Forrest’s love for his childhood girlfriend, Jenny (Robin Wright). An abused child, Jenny’s life path is a desperate wander to find solid ground. She falls prey to every social movement and fad of the times; unlike Forrest, whose unwavering strength and sense of right and wrong protect him from being caught up in social slides, Jenny’s genuflections reflect her lack of firm values and inner confidence.

To some extent, one could argue that Jenny symbolizes most of us. If any criticism might be leveled at the film, it is that its most heart-wrenching moments are too adeptly skirted, but, then again, that’s in keeping with Forrest’s strength. Highest praise to Zemeckis , who has reached a higher maturity plane with his gracefully, technically eloquent direction.

Carrying his torso in an erect, straight-arched manner, Hanks’ body language is all-telling. With each strange or perplexing situation, Hanks erupts with the smallest twitch or turn, signaling Forrest’s deep-seated disapproval or, in special other cases, his gleeful, thankful wonderment. Mykelti Williamson, as Forrest’s simple-minded G.I. buddy, is also outstanding, while Gary Sinise is sympathetic as Forrest’s bitter platoon leader, legless after the Vietnam War. — Duane Byrge , originally published on June 29, 1994. 

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Forrest gump review: robert zemeckis changed the way dramas are made with this crowd-pleasing classic.

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Pedro Páramo Review: Netflix's Plodding Magical Realism Adaptation Captures Realism But Not The Magic

10 harsh realities of rewatching forrest gump, 30 years later, forrest gump reunion movie flop finally passes box office milestone (but it's still struggling).

Director Robert Zemeckis is known for innovating the technology of filmmaking but with Forrest Gump , he combined that with a classic American tale. With Tom Hanks at his absolute peak and Robin Wright (who reunited in Here ) transitioning from eighties princess to dramatic actress, the trio were all at the perfect point in their careers to make an essentially strange movie and have it gross over $600 million at the global box office and sweep the Oscars.

Forrest Gump

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Perhaps one of the strangest box office successes in modern movie history, Forrest Gump is, at the end of the day, one long montage . When some people say that Forrest Gump is boring, they are usually referring to the subject matter but the film's pacing is actually relentless. Most scenes are under three minutes long, likely because the movie spans decades.

The Vietnam sequence is one of the few sequences that goes on longer and it is by far the most exciting part of the film. In contrast, Zemeckis gave the same treatment to Forrest’s three-year run, and it brought the film to a screeching halt. It is a testament to Hanks' inherent likability and charm that he can sustain being in almost every scene .

In Any Other Filmmaker's Hands, Forrest Gump Would've Been A Disaster

Tom hanks is a different kind of protagonist.

In different hands, Forrest Gump is the exact opposite of an Oscar winner. When you think about its combined parts, it's interesting, to say the least, that it became such a pop culture icon . “ Life is like a box of chocolates ” lives permanently in the American subconscious. But the film is a period piece with one action sequence and perhaps the most earnest, unreliable narrator of all time. Hanks is not portraying a typical protagonist and the tone of the film is truly unique. It's a crowd-pleaser that's almost universally loved — that means something.

Netflix's Pedro Páramo, starring Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Tenoch Huerta, is an adaptation that fails to capture what made the iconic novel so special.

What makes the film truly wild is how so many monumental things just happen to Forrest and we're able to just go along with it . Insinuating that Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and several presidents were heavily influenced by their time with Forrest, is hilariously fascinating. In any other film, that would be farce or science fiction. In Forrest Gump , these elements are inextricable from the plot but also an afterthought. That sort of straightforward comedy seems pedestrian now, but there is an inherent nostalgia that reminds us of a time when comedy didn’t have to be so self-referential.

That sort of straightforward comedy seems pedestrian now, but there is an inherent nostalgia that reminds us of a time when comedy didn’t have to be so self-referential.

Whenever I think the film starts to take itself too seriously, Zemeckis will throw a curveball and have a voice-over lead into a diegetic punchline. Forrest Gump has always made us cry but its ability to make us laugh has carried it through the decades. What stands out years later is how distant Robin Wright's Jenny feels from Forrest. The beginning and end have them side by side but she spends most of the film in tragic vignettes away from her friend. Her performance is unassailable but the suspension of disbelief is raised when she finally shows signs of affection.

Too Much Of A Good Thing

Playing the hits is one thing, but zemeckis pushes it too far.

The music in Forrest Gump is without a doubt corny. Second only to Martin Scorsese’s overuse of The Rolling Stones, Zemeckis' overuse of pop hits from the period is a frustrating fact about an American classic. An optimistic reading of this would be that it’s what would have been playing at the time. However, when “Running On Empty” is playing while Forrest is running for three years and getting tired, it becomes too much. No matter how much I like The Doors, hearing three of their songs in a row is overkill.

Regardless, generations of moviegoers have seen the film and that kind of staying power is extraordinary. Flaws and all, the movie unfolds like a book of short stories and that choice ushered in a confidence the script is able to pull off . Zemeckis refined the combination of dramatic real-life stories and CGI with Flight but the bones of that are in Forrest Gump . I'm not sure most people would say Forrest Gump is better than Back To The Future but it's safe to say Zemeckis has certainly made his mark on Hollywood.

In this iconic piece of American film history, the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson, the events of the Vietnam war, Watergate, and other history unfold through the perspective of an Alabama man with an IQ of 75.

• Hanks is undeniable in his best performance to date
• The pace keeps what could be a boring movie engaging
• Solid CGI but ultimately inconsistent
• The music lacks restraint