Fassbender Is Brilliant as Steve Jobs

Audiences have given Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs a so-so rating of 65% on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics, on the other hand, have given it a 91% rating, calling the film one of the year's best. Here's what they're saying:

• The film unfolds like a "three-act play," focusing on three key product launches, writes Christy Lemire at RogerEbert.com. Though he doesn't quite resemble Jobs, Michael Fassbender "embodies his drive, his restlessness," she writes. "There's an intensity to his presence and a directness in his eyes that make him not just compelling but commanding." She also admires how writer Aaron Sorkin portrays Jobs as flawed, yet doesn't try to redeem him.
• The flick is "written, directed, and acted to perfection, and so fresh and startling ... that it leaves you awed," Peter Travers writes at Rolling Stone, adding it's "sure to rank with the year's very best films." Fassbender "gives a towering performance of savage wit and limitless firepower. Is he really that good? Hell, yeah." The script, meanwhile, "is sheer brilliance." Sorkin "didn't so much follow Walter Isaacson's bestselling Jobs biography as absorb it into his DNA."

• "Just as The Social Network was not about Facebook … Steve Jobs is not really about Steve Jobs." It's "about the moral interaction between public performance and private behavior," Andrew O'Hehir writes at Salon. "This is simultaneously Sorkin's most satisfying movie script and Boyle's most graceful work as a director," he says, adding Kate Winslet is an "irresistible force of ferocious power and emotion" as Joanna Hoffman. "If there's an Oscar in this cast, beyond the one for which Fassbender will surely be nominated, it's hers."
• The film is clearly a dramatization, but that doesn't mean it isn't moving. "That underneath all the posturing and bravado, Steve Jobs was human after all is something this shooting star of a movie never lets us forget," writes Kenneth Turan at the Los Angeles Times. The film "bristles with crackling creative energy" and Winslet and Fassbender "go head to head like opera stars throwing themselves into legendary duets."

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