Going All the Way

Going All the Way is a familiar story told with daring and unsentimental eloquence. At a time when it is rare for exceptional books to become exceptional films, Pellington's debut arrives as a pleasant and welcome exception. [10 Oct 1997, p.C5]

Going All the Way is a deeper, cleverer film than it first seems.

Pellington, an award-winning music video director, has a good eye for setting scenes, although the movie falls a few times into a choppy video clip-to-video clip rut. [26 Oct 1997, p.04E]

The direction by first-timer Mark Pellington is competent, as he pretty much allows Wakefield's script to play out without fanfare. [10 Oct 1997]

Part satire and part confessional memoir, the film is stronger on period flavour and Sonny's inner demons than on the humanity of some of the other characters.

In "Going All the Way," a flashy movie adaptation of Dan Wakefield's popular 1970 novel about growing up in the heartland in the repressed 1950s, Mark Pellington, a director from the world of music video, has inflated a realistic memoir into a garish, hyperkinetic social satire.

Davies and Affleck are affecting and engaging as the callow young men on the verge of independent adulthood. One wishes that we had seen more of their personal drama instead of Going All the Way's myopic male gauntlet of shrews and Jews.