Review Roundup: Michael Fassbender& Kate Winslet Star in STEVE JOBS

Set backstage in the minutes before three iconic product launches spanning Jobs' career - beginning with the Macintosh in 1984, and ending with the unveiling of the iMac in 1988 - STEVE JOBS takes us behind the scenes of the digital revolution to paint an intimate portrait of the brilliant man at its epicenter.

STEVE JOBS is directed by Academy Award winner Danny Boyle and screenplay by Academy Award winner Aaron Sorkin, working from Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography of the Apple founder.

Michael Fassbender plays Steve Jobs, the pioneering founder of Apple, with Academy Award-winning actress Kate Winslet stars as Joanna Hoffman, former marketing chief of Macintosh. Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple is played by Seth Rogen, and Jeff Daniels stars as former Apple CEO John Sculley. The film also stars Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brennan, Jobs' ex-girlfriend, and Michawl Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original members of the Apple Macintosh development team.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

A.O. Scott, New York Times: The best thing about "Steve Jobs," the thing that makes it work as both tribute and critique, is how messy it is. It sprawls, it sags, it grinds its gears and at times almost crashes from frantic multitasking. And yet the result is not chaos but coherence. Rejecting both linear chronology and the frame-and-flashback template of most movie biographies, Mr. Sorkin concentrates on three crucial moments in Jobs's career. Though there are a few glances into the past, most of the action unfolds in the anxious minutes leading up to a product launch. The products are not the newest, the most successful or the best known. And the man presenting them is sometimes a clean-shaven yuppie in a bow tie and a double-breasted blazer, rather than the bestubbled, mock-turtlenecked guru we think we remember.

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Steve Jobs the movie aims to catch the man at three public points when people who defined their lives in relation to his showed up at the last minute to give him holy hell. Harsh? Yes. But essential to a film about a pioneer who created products with a slick, spotless veneer to hide all the tangled circuits inside. In Steve Jobs, sure to rank with the year's very best films, we see the circuits without ever diminishing the renegade whose vision is still changing our digital lives.

Justin Chang, Variety: Blowing away traditional storytelling conventions with the same withering contempt that seems to motivate its characters' every interaction, "Steve Jobs" is a bravura backstage farce, a wildly creative fantasia in three acts in which every scene plays out as a real-time volley of insults and ideas - insisting, with sometimes gratingly repetitive sound and fury, that Jobs' gift for innovation was perhaps inextricable from his capacity for cruelty. Straining like mad to be the "Citizen Kane" (or at least the "Birdman") of larger-than-life techno-prophet biopics, this is a film of brash, swaggering artifice and monumental ego, a terrific actors' showcase and an incorrigibly entertaining ride that looks set to be one of the fall's early must-see attractions.

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair: Fassbender's is a breathless, breathtaking performance, a perfect vehicle for his wiriness, his reediness, which are often ignored for his more forceful qualities. (See: the upcoming Macbeth.)

Benjamin Lee, The Guardian: There's undeniable craftsmanship here, especially in Fassbender's confident and transformative performance, but Sorkin's script fails to shout and quip its way to anything approaching dramatic vibrancy. If you spent hours queuing up for the latest iPhone, this might prove masturbatory. For everyone else, you'll remain a PC, and proudly so.

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: "Steve Jobs' pays little attention to the subject's genius. It is more interested in the filmmakers' theory that he lacked empathy because his original adoptive parents rejected him - and because Jobs' ego was so massive, he felt his sheer genius gave him the right to write checks in lieu of ever saying he was sorry. Though the latter years of Jobs' life (including his biggest triumphs) are not even mentioned, I came away with the feeling that the MAKERS of "Steve Jobs' were practically implying Jobs' early death at 56 was some kind of karmic payback. That's really harsh, and I don't think Oscar buyers are going to buy it.

Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly: I happen to be one of those folks who think there's nothing easier on the ear than a florid Sorkin walk-and-talk with its metaphorical arias and smartypants speeches. But it works better on a sitcom than in a biopic that has some responsibility of capturing reality. Maybe that's why as sharp and slick as Steve Jobs is, it ends up feeling more interested in entertainment than enlightenment.

Brian Truitt, USA Today: Steve Jobs is a fascinating study of a man, explaining who he was but never making a judgment about who he is. The movie lets audiences compute that for themselves.

Kwame Opam, The Verge: Steve Jobs never argues that Jobs was anything less than a great man. As a matter of fact, Sorkin's love of great flawed men may shine through too well here, since it's never that difficult to root for Jobs even at his worst. But the movie holds human connection in higher regard than technological progress, and for all the time Jobs spends trying to lead through art, design, and the revolutions he helped spearhead, he seldom looks behind to connect with the people he leads.

Christy Lemire, Roger Ebert: Thanks to Boyle's typically kinetic direction, "Steve Jobs" is certainly never boring. It rarely takes a breath and is crammed with high-tech jargon, but it never feels bogged down. Corridors come to life with imagery. Moments from the past crosscut seamlessly and inform the present, often with overlapping dialogue. And the glare of the lights and thunder of the crowds can be so all encompassing, they make you feel like you were there, too: on the precipice of the future.

Photo Credit: Official Facebook

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