1) Its ingredients call for a little of a chic flick and a heaping tablespoon of sports. (Illana Sroka, Lehigh University)
2) Whimsy seems to be approaching faster than a Roger Clemens fastball. (Jay Carr)
3) It's the kind of movie where there are no pennant-winning home runs, and where nobody even keeps the score. But it plays for keeps. (Jay Carr)
4) This is the kind of movie Frank Capra might have directed, and James Stewart might have starred in -- a movie about dreams. (Roger Ebert)
5) Field of Dreams is the first, unabashed, made-for-men, yuppie tear-jerker. (Peter Goddard)
6) Go on, it says. Let down your guard. Put the ol' glove on and imagine playing catch with your dad again. Go on. Don't worry. It's okay to cry. . . . Indeed, Field of Dreams is the late 80's equivalent of Rocky -- its evolution almost. (Peter Goddard)
7) Field of Dreams goes to the heart of a work so smartly written, so beautifully filmed, so perfectly acted, that it does the almost impossible trick of turning sentimentality into true emotion. (Caryn James)
8) This story is a modern-day version of a heroic Jimmy Stewart that is brought into the 1980's. It is a movie in which "a baseball diamond becomes the stuff of dreams." (Caryn James)
9) This is the myth of peanuts and Cracker Jacks, ball play as next to God, and Shoeless Joe Jackson as archangel. (Rita Kempley)
10) Everything from time travel to melodrama figures in this whimsically daft story, a romanticization that tries your patience even as your tear ducts well. It is, after all, hard to resist the notion that America's pastime is God's game of choice: The Lord is my umpire. (Rita Kempley)
11) Field of Dreams is a movie about crazy dreams and impossible reunions, and it presents baseball as a kind of national sacrament, the instrument of near-holy reconciliation between the generations. (Michael Wilmington)
12) The movie tries to dispel cynicism or doubts, by ignoring the world around it, serving up its magic pure and raw. And, if you want it, it will come. (Michael Wilmington)
