Rotten Tomatoes reported that 61% of 206 sampled critics gave "The Terminal" positive reviews, with an average rating of 6.2/10. The website's critical consensus reads, ""The Terminal" transcends its flaws through the sheer virtue of its crowd-pleasing message and a typically solid star turn from Tom Hanks." At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 55 out of 100, based on 41 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.