Bee Season

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.