"Writer-director Gary Ross questions America's affection for the way things used to be, the nostalgia for bygone values of the kind held by '50s sitcom families. Nobody killed anybody on the playground therein, it's true, but would you really want to reside in one of these bland, black-and-white suburbs? Ross gives two modern siblings a chance to do just that in Pleasantville, a wickedly clever spoof of the TV genre modeled on those mythical communities that the Nelsons, the Andersons and the Cleavers called home."
-- Rita Kempley, The Washington Post (October 23, 1998)

"In the twilight of the 20th century, here is a comedy to reassure us that there is hope -- that the world we see around us represents progress, not decay. Pleasantville, which is one of the year's best and most original films, sneaks up on us. It begins by kidding those old black-and-white sitcoms like Father Knows Best, it continues by pretending to be a sitcom itself, and it ends as a social commentary of surprising power.... The film observes that sometimes pleasant people are pleasant simply because they have never, ever been challenged. That it's scary and dangerous to learn new ways."
-- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times (October, 1998)

"Entertaining as it is, Pleasantville has its own black-and-white side that extends beyond the visual. The teens from the '90s, especially Jennifer/Mary Sue, bring a missionary zeal to awakening the benighted '50s types from their slumber. They wind up introducing truth, art and passion into Pleasantville in ways that make color bloom selectively on townspeople who have turned three-dimensional. By the time these newly enlightened characters have been labeled 'coloreds' and have stirred up a conservative backlash, the movie has seriously belabored its once-gentle metaphor and light comic spirit. Like The Truman Show, with which it overlaps a bit, Pleasantville has more inspired trickery than depth."
-- Janet Maslin, The New York Times (October 23, 1998)

"In conception and execution, Pleasantville is so ambitious, so clever and so satisfying in so many ways that the small inconsistency that mars its real achievement is almost negligible.... As the film explains it, it is not just sex, but emotion that changes people into color. Not just love, but any deep feeling, including sadness or anger. So why do all the black and white vigilantes with their angry denunciations of their multihued brethren remain black and white? Even within the film's own synthetic logic, it just doesn't make sense."
-- Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post (October 23, 1998)

"Ross understands that sex and music and books are all things that question society's assumptions. I like that he gives equal weight to great sex and Buddy Holly and Cezanne's still lifes and Huckleberry Finn, that he's tuned in to how all those things can hit you like a freight train when you first encounter them, and for years after.... Too often, Ross wants to pretend his metaphor of the '50s-as-sitcom is an accurate reflection of the decade itself. In other words, Ross condescends to the past by using a false version of it in order to make it seem simple-minded. Sure the '50s needed the shaking up that Elvis brought. But the people who chose to withdraw into pristine, squeaky-clean suburban life were reacting to the aftereffects of World War II and the hovering fear of the bomb. In Pleasantville, they're just genial idiots."
-- Charles Taylor, Salon (October 23, 1998)

"Pleasantville speciously attacks '50s conformity by attacking airheaded entertainment it seems to find exclusively representative of the era. But just as the real-life '50s were more complex than their reputation, so were TV and movies.... For all the Oscar-worthy brilliance of its combined black-and-white/color visual effects, Pleasantville needs to be either a feel-good romp like Back to the Future or a satire that brutally roasts all there is to deplore about the '50s and the '90s."
-- Mike Clark, USA Today (1998)

"It was bad enough when the doomsayers were indicting The Jerry Springer Show for hollowing out our souls. Now we've got to worry about Nick at Nite.... Nobody -- not even studio executives -- actually mistakes Father Knows Best for the real world. Ross is subverting a pop ideal we never believed in anyway. Worse, he wants to be hailed as a truth-teller for his troubles. Pleasantville is a prime piece of showbiz sentimentalism: It says that life isn't like Hollywood, yet its frame of reference is almost entirely Hollywood pap -- and white, middle-class pap at that."
-- Peter Rainer, New York Magazine (November 2, 1998)

"Pleasantville is ultramodern and beautiful. But technical elegance and fine performances mask the shallowness of a story as simpleminded as the '50s TV to which it condescends; certainly it's got none of the depth, poignance, and brilliance of The Truman Show, the recent TV-is-stifling drama that immediately comes to mind."
-- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly (October 23, 1998)