Rgatime is a loving, beautifully mounted, graceful film that creates its characters with great clarity.

Ragtime itself twinkles with delight - perhaps only an immigrant, and a recent one, could have made this film, which looks squarely at the social problems gnawing at North America but which finds, within them and without them, cause for hope. [20 Nov 1981]

The page-turning joys of E.L. Doctorow's bestselling Ragtime, which dizzily and entertainingly charted a kaleidoscopic vision of a turn-of-century America in the midst of intense social change, have been realized almost completely in Milos Forman's superbly crafted screen adaptation.

Ambitious, but only sporadically engaging.

The movie is sorrowful, funny and beautiful. It is also, finally, very unsatisfactory.

Forman and Weller have created an impressive but strangely lopsided movie.

Except for the evocative sets and Randy Newman's upbeat musical score, Ragtime is better read than seen. [18 Dec 1981]