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Bee Season
Fox Searchlight Pictures


5.1

based on 32 reviews
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How did we calculate this?

based on 16 votes
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FILM:

The Deep End

MPAA 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)

GENRE(S):	Drama
WRITTEN BY:	Naomi Foner Myla Goldberg (novel)
DIRECTED BY:	Scott McGehee David Siegel
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: April 4, 2006 Theatrical: November 11, 2005
RUNNING TIME:	104 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

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...

100

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The performance by Flora Cross is haunting in its seriousness. She doesn't act out; she acts in.

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.

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.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Based on the captivating novel by Myla Goldberg, Bee Season is evocative and superbly acted.

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.

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.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Bee Season is lit by human sunbeam Flora Cross as Eliza.

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.

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.

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.

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?

ReelViews James Berardinelli

There's no shortage of material on the screen in Bee Season - it's just not assembled in a satisfying manner.

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.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Here the foundation has been miscast. That's M-I-S-C-A-S-T.

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.

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.

Village Voice Jessica Winter

The mysticism only mystifies; its hieroglyphics are vividly rendered, but Bee Season never manages to spell them out.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Ultimately, its success may depend on how emotionally satisfying audiences find this flirtation with Jewish mysticism.

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

The attempt to be clever is transparent.

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.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Fine directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel take a detour into mumbo jumbo.

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.

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.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

This well-meaning mistake gets lost in the metaphors.

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.

Empire Steve O'Hagan

Gloopy family drama meets Hollywood cod-spirituality in a movie that’s defeated by its over-ambitious scope.

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.

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.

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.

New York Post Kyle Smith

F-A-I-L-U-R-E.

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.

Bee Season Fox Searchlight Pictures

Bee Season
Fox Searchlight Pictures