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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

67
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Hurt Locker, The
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Goodbye Solo
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Tulpan
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Gomorrah
86
Seraphine
84
Summer Hours
83
U2 3D
83
Revanche
83
Tyson
82
Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
82
Sugar
82
Hunger
82
Anvil! The Story of Anvil
81
Il Divo
81
Beaches of Agnes, The
80
Food, Inc.
80
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79
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
78
Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, The
78
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77
Every Little Step
77
Sin Nombre
75
24 City
74
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74
Afghan Star
74
Two Lovers
74
Song of Sparrows, The
74
Lemon Tree
71
Pressure Cooker
71
Jerichow
70
Shall We Kiss?
70
Tony Manero
70
End of the Line, The
69
Valentino: The Last Emperor
69
Unmistaken Child
67
$9.99
67
Rudo y Cursi
67
Girlfriend Experience, The
66
Adoration
66
Moon
65
Sex Positive
65
Departures
64
Outrage
64
Examined Life
64
Throw Down Your Heart
64
Lymelife
63
Tokyo!
63
Cheri
63
Dead Snow
63
Tetro
63
Great Buck Howard, The
62
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62
Big Man Japan
62
Not Forgotten
61
Sunshine Cleaning
60
Under Our Skin
59
Sleep Dealer
58
Julia
58
Easy Virtue
57
Away We Go
57
Merry Gentleman, The
57
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56
Girl from Monaco, The
56
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55
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54
Is Anybody There?
54
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54
Stoning of Soraya M., The
52
Quiet Chaos
50
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48
Alien Trespass
45
Whatever Works
42
Little Ashes
42
Tennessee
40
Limits of Control, The
40
Paris 36
38
Gigantic
36
Life is Hot in Cracktown
35
New York
28
Big Shot-Caller, The
28
Surveillance
22
What Goes Up
18
Downloading Nancy
16
I Hate Valentine's Day
xx
Call of the Wild
xx
Home
xx
Offshore
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Elizabethtown
Paramount Pictures
FILM:
MPAA 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)
| GENRE(S): |
Comedy
|
Drama
|
Romance
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Cameron Crowe
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Cameron Crowe
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: February 7, 2006
Theatrical: October 14, 2005
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
138 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...
91
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.

80
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.

75
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.

75
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.

67
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.

63
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.

63
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.

63
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
What's sad is that Elizabethtown contains two GREAT sequences.

60
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.

60
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.

58
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.

58
Baltimore Sun
Chris Kaltenbach
Cameron Crowe crams at least three movies' worth of plotlines into Elizabethtown, and gives short shrift to all of them.

50
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.

50
USA Today
Claudia Puig
Though it's no fiasco -- there's nothing mythic about its disjointed story -- it is a failure.

50
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
An unmitigated, inexplicable, unforgivable flop.

50
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.

50
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.

50
Dallas Observer
Robert Wilonsky
It's a mess, absolutely, more a collage than a narrative.

50
The Hollywood Reporter
Ray Bennett
Tedious humor and sentimentality bury what could have been a pretty good road picture.

50
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.

50
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.

50
Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer
It may not be much of a movie, but it's a terrific concert.

50
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.

50
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.

50
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.

50
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.

40
Chicago Reader
J.R. Jones
An especially lame variation on Crowe's feel-good formula.

40
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.

40
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.

40
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.

40
Salon.com
Stephanie Zacharek
Elizabethtown is a sprawl, perhaps the victim of a kind of ADD of the heart.

38
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
Rambling, schmaltzy romantic comedy.

38
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.

30
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.
25
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.

25
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.

20
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.


The average user rating for this movie is 5.4 (out of 10) based on 85 User Votes
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