I won't try to highlight all the published reviews of Wordplay here, but I'll share a few links.
A 3-star review from the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips. A couple interesting Shortz-centric remarks.
Roger Ebert's 3-star review from the Chicago Sun-Times: "To be a crossword champion, you have to be incredibly intelligent; be capable of intuitive, lateral thinking; know everything, and focus your knowledge into a narrow and ultimately meaningless pursuit. Yes, that makes you an obsessive eccentric, but they're really the only interesting people left, don't you sometimes think?" I'll accept the interesting label, but no thanks on "obsessive eccentric." Ebert's got a few factual errors in the review (no! not Ebert!)
For more reviews, check the Rotten Tomatoes list of reviews (and summaries) by date.
More:
Lee Glickstein tipped us off to metacritic.com, a site that assigns numerical scores to movie reviews (e.g., 3 stars out of 4 = a 75). The average "metascore" for Wordplay is 72, which jibes with the 3-star reviews I've seen. There are links to the reviews, including Rolling Stone (reviewer's rating, 3 stars; average user rating, 3½ stars) and the New York Post (the critic has never finished a crossword but found the movie engaging).
June 23, 2006
More clips
Posted by Orange at 8:53 AM