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Bee Season
EMAILPRINTFox Searchlight Pictures
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 32 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 16 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
Naomi Foner
Myla Goldberg (novel)
Directed by:
Scott McGehee
David Siegel
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 11, 2005
DVD: April 4, 2006
Running Time: 104 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for thematic elements, a scene of sensuality and brief strong language
Starring Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Flora Cross, Max Minghella, and Kate Bosworth
Bee Season is the kaleidoscopic portrait of a modern American family whose picture-perfect surface conceals an underlying world of secret turmoil. (Fox Searchlight)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: The Deep End
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The performance by Flora Cross is haunting in its seriousness. She doesn't act out; she acts in.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Sometimes a movie can defy rational logic, yet still make sense emotionally in a way that pulls you through. Bee Season is one.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
With the help of clear direction and some excellent acting, especially from Flora Cross in a memorable debut as Eliza, Bee Season is affecting in ways that movies have all but given up trying to be.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
Based on the captivating novel by Myla Goldberg, Bee Season is evocative and superbly acted.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
One isn't quite ready to forgive the miscasting of Gere, however, who is about as convincing a Kabbalistic scholar as Madonna.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Bee Season, at its core, is about something powerful: The ways in which family members wreak destruction on each other with the best of intentions.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Bee Season is lit by human sunbeam Flora Cross as Eliza.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
A serious film filled with both great and awkward ideas and made as much from the heart as the head.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
For a film filled with jagged shards of glass, and sometimes shot kaleidoscopically, through the windows of houses or cars, Bee Season is carefully, almost relentlessly, intended. That said, the script, by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, touches on themes that rarely make it to the big screen.
Chicago Reader Meredith Brody
The directors exercise their stylistic flourishes mainly in the imaginative sequences depicting the young daughter's trancelike state while she conjures up the correct orthography in the spelling bees her father's determined she must win, and while the film observes the same heartbreaking obsessiveness as the popular "Spellbound," it has none of that documentary's cuteness.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
McGehee and Siegel's ornate structure and editing stay just this side of tricky, as does their borderline-goofy use of special effects to make us see the world (and the words) through Eliza's anxious eyes.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Bee Season answers the question no Talmudic student or fan of "Unfaithful" has thought to ask: What would Richard Gere look like as a learned Jewish scholar and teacher?
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
There's no shortage of material on the screen in Bee Season - it's just not assembled in a satisfying manner.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
The film ultimately is a letdown, leaving too many questions unanswered and ending in a gesture that doesn't really solve anything.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
A drama about dysfunction, spelling bees, mental illness, Hare Krishnas and kaballah. The movie is just as unwieldy as it sounds, except that it also stars Richard Gere.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
All these mystical elements are so sententiously handled and bump into one another so clumsily that they make the film seem nutty. But because spirituality is the theme of Bee Season, we are obviously not meant to laugh at it. Well, I wish I could get Jehovah's reaction to the picture.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Jessica Winter
The mysticism only mystifies; its hieroglyphics are vividly rendered, but Bee Season never manages to spell them out.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Ultimately, its success may depend on how emotionally satisfying audiences find this flirtation with Jewish mysticism.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
The film is ice cold, never finding a way to invite the viewer into the story, and Richard Gere doesn't convince as a Jewish biblical scholar.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole
Though bathed in ecclesiastical light and a work of obvious craft and ambition, Bee Season is grimly serious and rather full of itself.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Fine directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel take a detour into mumbo jumbo.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Melissa Levine
This is inelegant storytelling, and it almost entirely cancels out what's good about the film: Max Minghella, for one thing. The son of director Anthony, he gives a very fresh performance, popping with energy that the other characters seem to drain.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
Co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, whose visual schemes lent a hypnotic aura to their previous collaborations -- "The Deep End" and "Suture" -- don't find the right balance of story and image this time.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
This well-meaning mistake gets lost in the metaphors.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
Everyone in Bee Season is chasing spiritual peace and falling behind, and McGehee and Siegel catch them at their most worn-out and static.
Read Full Review >Empire Steve O'Hagan
Gloopy family drama meets Hollywood cod-spirituality in a movie that’s defeated by its over-ambitious scope.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
Myla Goldberg's novel about spelling-bee fever, a family in chaos, and religious/mystic exploration arrives on the screen with all its faults intact, but few of its charms.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Allison Benedikt
Gere and Binoche are both terribly miscast--one far too charismatic, the other far too dowdy, which is something for Juliette Binoche. And the spelling bees? Dull. Dreary.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
It took one novelist, one screenwriter and two directors - Scott McGehee and David Siegel - to cobble together this earnest nonsense, and if it weren't for 12-year-old novice Flora Cross, who plays its central character, all would be lost.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.1 (out of 10) based on 16 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Cheryl C. gave it a4:
Simply a pretentious mess. What a waste of the children's talents.
Chad S. gave it a4:
[***SPOILERS***] What's missing from "Bee Season" is that one scene in which we feel the thrill of Eliza's accomplishment. It's just not there. We think that moment is going to occur when Eliza and Aaron(Max Minghella) interrupt their father's class; something akin to Ned Beatty telling his co-workers that Rudy is going to Notre Dame. But no, we cut to the father's office, the big news already sprung, so we're denied Saul's initial bout of incredulousness. In the novel by Myla Goldberg, to my recollection, Miriam's depression never compartmentalizes Eliza's spelling bee training, and spelling bee competitions(most of the time, the spellers never get to finish their words) into afterthought. When you hire a big star like Juliette Binoche(her wanderings are introduced too early), that's going to happen. Not to mention, Richard Gere(in the book, I imagined Saul Naumann as a cross between Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street and Larry David). "Bee Season" needs more spelling and less, way less withering looks and tears. What if "Searching for Bobby Fischer" spent an inordinate amount of time on Lawrence Fishburne's hobo activities? I loved the book. This adaptation is very, very disappointing.
E. Phillips gave it a2:
What a bizzare movie! Talk about a dysfunctional family!! I wonder why Richard Gere would do such a movie.
Amurabi M. gave it a5:
This is a very intelectual movie. The directors made it that way. It´s clearly a snob job that manages the screenplay to make a clever reflection about spirituality these days. The trouble is that Bee Season is too clever, too egotistic and too overwritten. There´s no doubt than directors tries to put on film all the spirituality of the original source but they can´t make it. The essence of God and mysticism has been lost in their kaleidoscopical mise-en-scene.
Kat S gave it a10:
You don't really get the full meaning of the film until almost the end, so hang in there. In the meantime, you'll enjoy some of the finest acting by the four perfectly casted stars, and an entertaining story. When it ended, it took me a few minutes to piece it all together,and I feel it was about how four people try to find family through a closeness to God. You'll understand what I mean after you've seen it -- it's not obvious. I recommended it to all my friends who aren't "Hollywood only" type of movie goers, and in particular to those who like to discuss movies and bring that discussion into our own real life. I will never forget these touching, true performances. It's a snowball of a movie that gets better, both as the movie progresses, and as I later think about it.
bill C. gave it a0:
This film is just plain awful.Don't blame the actors, they showed up but the director,producer,writer,and everybody else envolved in this piece of dung should be ashamed. It's that bad.
paw a. gave it an8:
I read the book and liked it, so casting Gere maddened me, but as it turned out being a pompous jerk worked well for the part. Moving the family out of the synagogue and removing the humour didn't bode well. But in the end, taken on its own, the acting and story are excellent and very moving. That the charactors act out without a center is the whole point, btw. Binoche and Cross may be up for awards.
