Now Playing
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

sort by name

sort by score

38 12 Rounds
48 17 Again
76 Adventureland
48 Angels & Demons
54 Battle for Terra
xx Bruno
80 Coraline
40 Dance Flick
83 Drag Me to Hell
72 Earth
45 Fast & Furious
61 Fighting
34 Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
72 Gran Torino
73 Hangover, The
47 Hannah Montana: The Movie
51 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
54 Imagine That
41 Knowing
32 Land of the Lost
56 Monsters vs. Aliens
34 My Life in Ruins
51 My Sister's Keeper
46 Next Day Air
42 Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
54 Observe and Report
25 Obsessed
48 Proposal, The
70 Public Enemies
61 Soloist, The
83 Star Trek
64 State of Play
55 Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, The
52 Terminator Salvation
35 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
77 Under the Sea 3D
88 Up
43 X-Men Origins: Wolverine
34 Year One

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

sort by name

sort by score

67 $9.99
75 24 City
66 Adoration
74 Afghan Star
48 Alien Trespass
56 American Violet
82 Anvil! The Story of Anvil
57 Away We Go
81 Beaches of Agnes, The
62 Big Man Japan
28 Big Shot-Caller, The
78 Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, The
55 Brothers Bloom, The
82 Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
xx Call of the Wild
63 Cheri
62 Cherry Blossoms
63 Dead Snow
65 Departures
18 Downloading Nancy
58 Easy Virtue
70 End of the Line, The
77 Every Little Step
64 Examined Life
80 Food, Inc.
38 Gigantic
56 Girl from Monaco, The
67 Girlfriend Experience, The
87 Gomorrah
89 Goodbye Solo
63 Great Buck Howard, The
79 Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
xx Home
82 Hunger
91 Hurt Locker, The
16 I Hate Valentine's Day
81 Il Divo
54 Is Anybody There?
71 Jerichow
58 Julia
74 Lemon Tree
36 Life is Hot in Cracktown
40 Limits of Control, The
42 Little Ashes
64 Lymelife
50 Management
57 Merry Gentleman, The
66 Moon
35 New York
62 Not Forgotten
xx Offshore
78 O'Horten
64 Outrage
40 Paris 36
54 Pontypool
71 Pressure Cooker
52 Quiet Chaos
83 Revanche
67 Rudo y Cursi
86 Seraphine
65 Sex Positive
70 Shall We Kiss?
77 Sin Nombre
59 Sleep Dealer
74 Song of Sparrows, The
54 Stoning of Soraya M., The
82 Sugar
84 Summer Hours
61 Sunshine Cleaning
28 Surveillance
42 Tennessee
63 Tetro
64 Throw Down Your Heart
80 Tokyo Sonata
63 Tokyo!
70 Tony Manero
74 Treeless Mountain
88 Tulpan
74 Two Lovers
83 Tyson
83 U2 3D
60 Under Our Skin
69 Unmistaken Child
69 Valentino: The Last Emperor
22 What Goes Up
45 Whatever Works
57 Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Elizabethtown
Paramount Pictures


5.4

based on 37 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 85 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

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...

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.

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.

Elizabethtown Paramount Pictures

Elizabethtown
Paramount Pictures