Critic Reviews

The School of Rock was made by gifted veterans of the American indie scene, but it's still the most unlikely great movie of the year.

It's a bravura, all-stops-out, inexhaustibly inventive performance. I don't know how much was improvised, and how much comes from White's sharp screenplay, but Black may never again get a part that displays his mad-dog comic ferocity to such brilliant effect. He, and the movie, kick ass.

Three of the hippest indie film princes make a perfect commercial comedy.

First and foremost a very funny film, and a very pleasant one that doesn't really have a villain. Credit for its hilarity goes largely to Black, who gives the performance of his career as a character who might have seemed merely coarse and crude in less gifted hands.

This joyous farce is a big, big deal, and Jack Black is nothing less than majestic as a scruffy, irreverent rocker passing himself off as a pedagogue in a private school.

An exuberant, raucous and thoroughly endearing comedy

All Black, all the time, and could easily have been an exhausting mess. But the movie is coherent, hilarious and surprisingly sweet.

Crowd-pleasing, feel-good stuff.

School of Rock kicks ass. It's one movie that definitely goes to eleven.

Linklater, whose previous movies include "Slacker," "Before Sunrise," and "Waking Life," may be the most versatile director of his generation. School of Rock is his most unabashedly mainstream movie by far, and yet it’s commercial in the best way.