Cloverfield

Empire Olly Richards

A dazzling experiment that paid off immensely, this is cinematic pleasure at its purest. One caveat: If they ever make a sequel, we’re taking two stars back.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

We’ve never sat through anything with Cloverfield’s subjective sting. You’d have to be tougher than I was not to be blown sideways by it.

Village Voice Nathan Lee

Cloverfield never stops to identify the why, whence, or whereto of its rampaging meanie—this relentless thriller stops for nothing—but as for what to call it, behold . . . al-Qaedzilla!

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Cloverfield is the most intense and original creature feature I've seen in my adult moviegoing life, and that's coming from a guy who knows his Gojira from his Gamera and his Harryhausen from his Honda. Cloverfield isn't a horror film – it's a pure-blood, grade A, exultantly exhilarating monster movie.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's a sharp and vivid film, filled with moments of tremendous ingenuity and characterized by a persistent avoidance of the expected tropes. It's far scarier than the big-budget remakes of "Godzilla" and "King Kong," more engaging than "I Am Legend," more human than a sackful of slasher films.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Cloverfield, a surreptitiously subversive, stylistically clever little gem of an entertainment disguised, under its deadpan-neutral title, as a dumb Gen-YouTube monster movie, makes the convincingly chilling argument that the world will end -- or, at least, Manhattan will crumble -- with a bang and a whimper.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Cloverfield's gritty, in-your-face style is uncompromising. If you're looking for a nice, clean movie filmed with a steadycam, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

It’s dumb but quick and dirty and effectively brusque, dispensing with niceties such as character.

Premiere Eric Alt

It's not the life-changing movie experience the intense viral marketing attention would lead you to think it is, but its decision to focus on ground-level humanism rather than epic disaster is what separates it from the pack.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Andy Spletzer

When the monster shows up, pretty early in the film, everything becomes much more interesting, as it smashes buildings in midtown Manhattan like some sort of Rudy Giuliani, 9/11 nightmare.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The genre may be old news, but the skillfully made Cloverfield offers a heart-racing experience with plenty of chills, thrills and exhilaration.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Manhattan has always been a fat target for apocalypse filmmakers, but with its 9/11-inspired imagery, Matt Reeves' breathlessly fast-paced Cloverfield is going to resonate with New York audiences in a way no other horror film has.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Cloverfield is an exercise in realism that lacks reality's broader and richer context. Or, put another way, the experiment is artful, but it ain't art.

San Francisco Chronicle Peter Hartlaub

Produced by "Lost" and "Alias" mastermind J.J. Abrams, Cloverfield has been one of the more interesting experiments in large-scale guerrilla filmmaking.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

It's been a while since we've had a good monster movie, and while Cloverfield probably won't give you sleepless nights, it will certainly keep you awake in the theater.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Mercifully, at 84 minutes the movie is even shorter than its originally alleged 90-minute running time; how much visual shakiness can we take? And yet, all in all, it is an effective film, deploying its special effects well and never breaking the illusion that it is all happening as we see it.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Cloverfield is content to be a creature feature; that's what makes it bearable and what keeps it from greatness. The genre, not the script, does the psychological heavy lifting.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

There are a few surprises lurking in Cloverfield, and director Matt Reeves has an uncanny ability to time his jolts and scare when you least expect it.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

It’s a thoroughly intense and mostly entertaining movie.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Cloverfield is a vastly old-fashioned piece of work, creaking with hilarious contrivance. I was thrilled, for instance, to hear someone actually speak the line “It’s alive!”

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

Think "Godzilla Unplugged" -- with chillingly effective results.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

The narrative conceit requires a fair amount of indulgence as the story progresses, but the fleeting, incomplete glimpses of the monster early on prove the old dictum of B movie auteur Val Lewton that a momentary image can have greater impact than a prolonged one.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Long on style and technique, short on substance and plot.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Much scampering, yelling, quaking and crying is required of the actors, and they acquit themselves well enough, even with oozing fake wounds and prop rebars piercing their shoulder blades.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Now that the fanboy hype has cleared, we can see Cloverfield for what it is: borrowed inspiration, trite screenwriting and amateurish acting all in the service of a ballsy idea -- that a horror movie could maybe, just maybe, have a soul.

Slate Dana Stevens

Despite a first reel entirely devoted to establishing characters, Cloverfield is basically a line-'em-up, pick-'em-off horror movie that's effective without being either viscerally frightening or emotionally moving. Watching it is like going through a car wash: You come out of it thoroughly Cloverfield-ized, but essentially unchanged.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

An efficient but shallow fright show.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Combines unpleasantness and stupidity to a degree that would be difficult to match unless you were stuck in bed with a case of the shingles while being forced to watch “The Ghost Whisperer."

Variety Todd McCarthy

Despite its indie-flavored shooting style, first-rate visual effects, reasonable intensity factor, nihilistic attitude and post-9/11 anxiety overlay, this punchy sci-fier is, in the end, not much different from all the marauding creature features that have come before it.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

While the entertainment value of Cloverfield is highly negotiable, it's clear that Abrams has consciously aligned himself with those filmmakers who have used the template of a grade-B monster/invasion movie -- Don Siegel, George Romero, Steven Spielberg -- as a stealth vessel for social commentary.

Time Richard Corliss

Mind you, I don't begrudge the creators of even a junk-food movie like Cloverfield the fun they had demolishing New York one more time.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust

Adept at wringing maximum suspense and might have reached the heights of the Korean monster film "The Host" but for the limitations of the camcorder ploy. While it injects the film with a run-and-gun urgency, the device grows tiresome and ultimately leaves the film shortchanged.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

No movie this year will better embody Macbeth's description of life itself: "a tale ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Washington Post John Anderson

Cloverfield is a relentless, I-thought-my-eyeballs-were-bleeding exercise in visual disorientation.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Like too many big-studio productions, Cloverfield works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt. Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

It pretends to examine how self-absorbed we are as a culture, only to be consumed by its own self-absorption. It's also badly constructed, humorless and emotionally sadistic .