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Elizabethtown

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 37 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 85 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Drama | Romance
Written by: Cameron Crowe
Directed by: Cameron Crowe
Release Date:
Theatrical: October 14, 2005
DVD: February 7, 2006
Running Time: 138 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for language and some sexual references
Starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Bruce McGill, Judy Greer, Jessica Biel, and Paul Schneider
A love letter to the resilience of the life force, Elizabethtown is a charming, music-filled journey that proves amazing things can happen when you least expect them. (Paramount Pictures)
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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...
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
That rare animal, a dialogue-driven comedy -- and a good one at that. While one or two of its scenes may seem a tad too talky for today's low-attention spans, the script is mostly razor-sharp acerbic and sophisticated.
Read Full Review >Empire Simon Braund
Crowe is still a master navigator of swampy territory, and any movie that can warm the heart and tickle the funny bone without selling its soul is to be cherished, warts and all.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
It's an uncommonly optimistic meditation on death and lament, befitting a filmmaker whose movies (Jerry Maguire, Singles, Say Anything), no matter their subject matter, always double as a celebration of life.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Nowhere near one of Crowe's great films (like "Almost Famous"), but it is sweet and good-hearted and has some real laughs.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
There are wonders here, but there are as many things that just plain make you wonder. By the end you're too addled to be truly moved.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Crowe likes to work with large ensembles...But he doesn't know when we've had enough, however interesting they all may be; he's like a guy who decorates a Christmas tree with so many ornaments that you can't see the foliage.
Read Full Review >Premiere Allison Williams
Beyond the tunes, however, Elizabethtown falls short of actual emotional resonance, and is really nothing more than a passable "Garden State" doppelgänger.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
What's sad is that Elizabethtown contains two GREAT sequences.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly John Patterson
Crowe's undeniable gifts -- his well-crafted individual scenes and his love for his characters -- are more evident here than his flaws.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
Only a truly great director can make a film of high artistic merit, filled with personality and memorable scenes, that's still a borderline disaster. (Think One From The Heart or 1941.) So the heartfelt and woefully miscalculated Elizabethtown may be the film that marks Cameron Crowe's arrival as a truly great director.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Think of Elizabethtown as Cameron Crowe's rambling amateur travelogue, one from a well-liked professional filmmaker momentarily so distracted by private notes scrawled on his souvenir map that he gets lost en route to telling his story of self-renewal. This undershaped, overlong warmedy is an homage to the memory of his late father.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
Cameron Crowe crams at least three movies' worth of plotlines into Elizabethtown, and gives short shrift to all of them.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Audiences of a certain hipster disposition, in fact, will see Elizabethtown and pine for Zach Braff's ''Garden State," the movie to which Elizabethtown bears an unfortunate and inferior resemblance.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
Though it's no fiasco -- there's nothing mythic about its disjointed story -- it is a failure.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
An unmitigated, inexplicable, unforgivable flop.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
The film's problems lie with the lack of spark between a wired Dunst and a bland Bloom, and the meltdown of Drew's mother (Susan Sarandon), who grieves by tap-dancing.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
That gift doesn't desert him [Crowe] in Elizabethtown, but he clutters his movie with plot elements that confuse the focus, the central character and, ultimately, I suspect, Crowe himself.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky
It's a mess, absolutely, more a collage than a narrative.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett
Tedious humor and sentimentality bury what could have been a pretty good road picture.
Read Full Review >Variety Leslie Felperin
Although rich in screwball silliness and sharp one-liners, film lacks the narrative drive one finds in the classic comedies of Preston Sturges, Frank Capra and Billy Wilder, whom Crowe always seems to try to emulate.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Laura Sinagra
Where the earlier flick (Garden State), in its smallness, felt like an honest representation of writer-director-star Zach Braff's struggles with notions of home, Crowe's is a hodgepodge of great ideas and moods in search of a plot to enrich.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
It may not be much of a movie, but it's a terrific concert.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
Elizabethtown is a long, lurching trip to nowhere in particular, but Elizabethtown is a place where you wouldn't mind spending some more time, though perhaps under different circumstances.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
A mess of a movie -- but a warm, friendly mess that's hard not to like, even when it tests your patience.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
For all sort of reasons, I was disappointed that there is barely anything of Bruce McGill as the family's hearty swindler. And there is too much of Sarandon, whose big scene--a speech at her late husband's memorial service, complete with jokes and a tap dance--is the movie's most egregious misfire.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
This lighthearted meditation on life, death, love and timing contains some genuinely lovely scenes, but they're buried in a shapeless jumble of cutesy-pie vignettes.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
An especially lame variation on Crowe's feel-good formula.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
When she's (Dunst) off the screen, Elizabethtown goes dark and broody, stranding us with the morose Bloom during a third-act road trip that goes everywhere and nowhere at once.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
The biggest problem with Elizabethtown isn't in its shopworn theme, but that it's perhaps the first of Crowe's movies (though "Jerry Maguire"comes very close) that really feels forced.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
Crowe is attempting a modern screwball comedy--the kind of thing that, sixty years ago, Howard Hawks, directing Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, would have turned into romantic farce--but he has scaled the movie as an epic and turned his gabby heroine into a fount of New Age wisdom.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Elizabethtown is a sprawl, perhaps the victim of a kind of ADD of the heart.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Crowe was going for something magical in all this, but the film is so affected and mannered, so preciously in love with itself, that it's painful to watch. Scenes go on and on, and when you think the movie's over, it goes on and on some more.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
A saga of static set pieces and strenuously clever notions, this is a fiasco of a film if ever there was one.
Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
So many romantic comedies come and go without making the slightest impression. Elizabethtown is not one of them; I found it galling.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
It's obvious now that the cinematic junk routinely released every Friday can be safely categorized as a mere failure. But this alleged comedy is a whole other species entirely. This is a bona fide, absolute, unmitigated fiasco.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
It's hard to believe the creative mind that gave us "Almost Famous," "Jerry Maguire," "Say Anything" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" looked up with satisfaction after typing 117 pages of this.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.4 (out of 10) based on 85 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Colstman gave it a2:
Unbelievably awful. Watched it with my wife and daughter and they thought it was dire.
David gave it an8:
the movie was about a person so tied up in his misfounture that he stop living. then a girl comes along shows him there is still life after failure. best to celebrate life and remembrance.
Ian T. gave it a10:
Elizabethtown is one of the all great movies with one of the best sound tracks around. It’s a movie about life, we will all experience parts of Elizabethtown in our lives. Orlando Bloom & Kirsten Dunst were great. Elizabethtown comes highly recommended.
Jack C. gave it an8:
Elizabethtown is flawed, but I really like this movie. There are some scenes that are actually somewhat cringe worthy and Orlando Bloom, while not horrible, is not the ideal actor for this role. However, all that aside, I really think this is quite an underrated movie. To me, this is one of the truest feel-good movies there is. I feel motivated and happier after watching this movie. There is heart in it. And while heart alone does not make a good movie, there is something to be said about pure, lighthearted movie that makes you feel good. Again, the movie is flawed in a few ways, especially structurally. The whole road trip part at the end, while I like it, does feel tacked on and awkward, as it feels like the movie already ended. Also, the fiasco about the shoe is unbelievable. Still, if you're going through a rough time, or if anything similar to what the main character is going through in the movie, give the movie a shot, it might even make you smile.
steve s gave it a3:
i have loved cameron crowe's movies. but not this one. this was a tedious movie of disjointed scenes and corny - at best - (if not silly), over sappy scenes which just didnt work.
J Jarvis gave it a10:
This film touched me. I wish to have a road-trip with my dad...before he passes. The Chuck & Cindy wedding was great. Also a wish.
Scarbarough Painless gave it a10:
This movie was very beautiful, and very thought provoking. Like the best of these films, the soundtrack was exquisite, cinematography right on target, and a little off kilter. The subject matter brought questions of life, and what it's worth. Is true love really worth an otherwise banal existence? The answer is a resounding yes.
