Elizabethtown

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

What's sad is that Elizabethtown contains two GREAT sequences.

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.

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.

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.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

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

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.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Though it's no fiasco -- there's nothing mythic about its disjointed story -- it is a failure.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

An unmitigated, inexplicable, unforgivable flop.

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.

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.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

It's a mess, absolutely, more a collage than a narrative.

The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

Tedious humor and sentimentality bury what could have been a pretty good road picture.

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.

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.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

It may not be much of a movie, but it's a terrific concert.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

An especially lame variation on Crowe's feel-good formula.

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.

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.

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.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Elizabethtown is a sprawl, perhaps the victim of a kind of ADD of the heart.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Rambling, schmaltzy romantic comedy.

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.

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.

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.

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.