Movies
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Wide Releases
Now In Theaters
76
(500) Days of Summer
60
9
17
All About Steve
37
Amelia
53
Astro Boy
66
Bandslam
45
Box, The
61
Capitalism: A Love Story
55
Christmas Carol, A
43
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
66
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
29
Collector, The
23
Couples Retreat
80
District 9
61
Extract
39
Fame
30
Final Destination, The
34
Fourth Kind, The
60
Funny People
32
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
27
Gamer
41
G-Force
39
Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, The
46
Halloween II
73
Hangover, The
78
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
55
I Can Do Bad All By Myself
66
Informant!, The
69
Inglourious Basterds
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
66
Julie & Julia
34
Law Abiding Citizen
33
Love Happens
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
51
My Sister's Keeper
42
Orphan
28
Pandorum
63
Perfect Getaway, A
86
Ponyo![]()
35
Post Grad
48
Proposal, The
30
Saw VI
53
Shorts
24
Sorority Row
83
Star Trek![]()
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
55
Taking Woodstock
47
Time Traveler's Wife
96
Toy Story/Toy Story 2 3D![]()
35
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
28
Ugly Truth, The
88
Up![]()
71
Where the Wild Things Are
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Limited Releases
Now In Theaters
58
(Untitled)
96
35 Shots of Rum![]()
56
Adam
72
Adela
39
Adventures of Power
78
Afghan Star
61
After the Storm
66
Afterschool
xx
All the Best
58
American Casino
72
Amreeka
48
Antichrist
73
Araya
62
Art & Copy
55
As Seen Through These Eyes
76
Baader Meinhof Complex, The
86
Beaches of Agnes, The![]()
13
Beautiful Life, A
70
Beeswax
35
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
71
Big Fan
66
Black Dynamite
51
Blind Date
xx
Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
76
Bliss
35
Blue Tooth Virgin, The
26
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
57
Boys Are Back, The
45
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81
Bright Star![]()
70
Bronson
45
Burning Plain, The
xx
Carriers
55
Casi Divas
57
Chelsea on the Rocks
62
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
69
Cold Souls
59
Collapse
44
Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
82
Cove, The![]()
75
Crude
82
Damned United, The![]()
67
Departures
xx
Dil Bole Hadippa
71
Disgrace
xx
Do Knot Disturb
70
Earth Days
24
Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat
85
Education, An![]()
55
Endgame
xx
Eulogy for a Vampire
xx
Everyone Else
xx
Fatal Promises
56
Fifty Dead Men Walking
62
Five Minutes of Heaven
74
Flame & Citron
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
28
Free Style
xx
From Mexico with Love
50
Fuel
25
Gentlemen Broncos
50
Give Me Your Hand
58
Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
72
Good Hair
89
Goodbye Solo![]()
52
Grace
64
Harmony and Me
81
Headless Woman, The![]()
xx
Heretics, The
63
Horse Boy, The
73
House of the Devil, The
xx
How to Seduce Difficult Women
74
Humpday
94
Hurt Locker, The![]()
29
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
16
If One Thing Matters: A Film About Wolfgang Tillmans
75
In Search of Beethoven
83
In the Loop![]()
61
Intimate Enemies
42
Irene in Time
70
It Might Get Loud
46
Killing Kasztner
19
Labor Day
xx
Laila's Birthday
41
Little Ashes
41
Little Traitor, The
66
Liverpool
34
Looking for Palladin
80
Lorna's Silence
83
Maid, The![]()
xx
Ministers, The
59
More Than a Game
67
Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, The
34
Motherhood
62
My One and Only
xx
Mystery Team
48
New York, I Love You
73
Night and Day
66
No Impact Man
47
Ong Bak 2: The Beginning
34
Other Man, The
xx
Painter Sam Francis, The
54
Paper Heart
xx
Paradise
68
Paranormal Activity
68
Paris
44
Peter and Vandy
35
Play the Game
77
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
xx
Pretty Ugly People
65
Providence Effect, The
76
Rembrandt's J'accuse
69
September Issue, The
79
Serious Man, A
40
Shrink
61
Skin
77
Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, A
xx
Skiptracers
46
Splinterheads
39
St. Trinian's
89
Still Walking![]()
50
Stoning of Soraya M., The
55
Storm
65
Tetro
70
That Evening Sun
72
Thirst
xx
Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D (re-release)
61
Trucker
xx
Turning Green
83
U2 3D![]()
66
Unmade Beds
66
Unmistaken Child
70
Visual Acoustics
55
Walt & El Grupo
67
Way We Get By, The
69
We Live in Public
64
Wedding Song, The
64
Where is Where?
xx
White on Rice
74
Woman in Berlin, A
69
World's Greatest Dad
70
Yes Men Fix the World
69
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
xx
You, the Living
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Cloverfield

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 37 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 605 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Action | Sci-fi | Suspense/Thriller
Written by: Drew Goddard
Directed by: Matt Reeves
Release Date:
Theatrical: January 18, 2008
DVD: April 22, 2008
Running Time: 90 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for violence, terror and disturbing images
Starring Michael Stahl-David, Mike Vogel, Odette Yustman, Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, and T.J. Miller
Five young New Yorkers throw their friend a going-away party the night that a monster the size of a skyscraper descends upon the city. Told from the point of view of their video camera, the film is a document of their attempt to survive the most surreal, horrifying event of their lives. (Paramount Pictures)
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...
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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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!
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
It’s dumb but quick and dirty and effectively brusque, dispensing with niceties such as character.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
It’s a thoroughly intense and mostly entertaining movie.
Read Full Review >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!”
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen
Think "Godzilla Unplugged" -- with chillingly effective results.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
Long on style and technique, short on substance and plot.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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."
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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."
Read Full Review >Washington Post John Anderson
Cloverfield is a relentless, I-thought-my-eyeballs-were-bleeding exercise in visual disorientation.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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 .
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.8 (out of 10) based on 605 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Rick W. gave it a10:
Awesome movie interesting mix of monster movie, terror, action flick. One of the best movies I have ever seen. The way it was shot, you feel like you are part of everything.
Albert D. gave it an8:
Very good monster film.
Jimothy T. gave it a0:
One of the worst movies of this decade. The first person was not cool, or original, but just annoying. Lame shots of the monster, poor dialog, and needless to say a horrible ending.
Luke G gave it a9:
Its a good movie, clover (the monster) is alright but not the best, the camera is original, plots kinda original, acting is good, its kinda freaky too.
God Zilla gave it a0:
Too bad the knuckleheads behind this 'monstrously' vacuous hack-job weren't smart enough to satirize themselves and their perpetually juvenile, self-absorbed audience. But, then again, why should they? Clearly, the bubblehead YouTube generation off of whom they feed royally remunerates them at the box office. Too dumb and removed from actual, lived experience to discern the difference between fiction and reality, or between idiot versus ingenious fiction, the majority of the current youth crowd in this country is the most pathetic ever conceived in human history. Talk about gargantuan urban menace -- they're it.
Ben D gave it a1:
Another pathetic Fuck You NYC from LA. I actually enjoy that genre as a rule. But this one goes below the belt - which would be OK if it was intended to be nasty. But this is just lazy. I love a good monster and have always enjoyed watching pretty people get dispatched one by one (or two or three). But this movie is worse than bad. It is just as calculated and insulting as those jackass color panic codes or the 2002 convention in nyc. The movie simply lifts images from 9/11for popcorn entertainment, either to be faux edgy (eg LA edgy) or more likely because the directors couldn't actually come up with something original. I don't have a problem with movies dealing with 9/11 or using images that resonate from that day. But it has to have some meaning beyond cheap jollies. I can't say i am shocked, given the fact that we now seem to think it's ok to watch footage of fatal crashes - with even National Geographic whoring itself out to make a buck off of bloodlust. But I am irritated at myself for actually sitting through this movie. I'm also a little saddened by the fact that none of the other people posting on this page seem to have been bothered in the least by this exploitation of real people's suffering.
J. C gave it a9:
This Was Incredible To Me!So Suspenseful To Me.The Only Flaws Was The Bad Ending.
