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.

Jacket, The
Warner Independent Pictures


7.5

based on 35 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 37 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: R for violence, language and brief sexuality/nudity

Starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kelly Lynch, Brad Renfro, Daniel Craig, and Jason Lewis

This mind-bending drama melds elements of a thriller, romance, murder mystery and time-travel fantasy. (Warner Independent Pictures)

GENRE(S):	Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	Massy Tadjedin Tom Bleecker (story) Marc Rocco (story)
DIRECTED BY:	John Maybury
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: June 21, 2005 Theatrical: March 4, 2005
RUNNING TIME:	102 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA / UK

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...

Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson

The first great film of 2005.

The Hollywood Reporter Duane Byrge

Admittedly, The Jacket is not likely to be everyone's cup of tea, but filmmaker John Maybury has forged a mesmerizing mindblower.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The result is what you might call a mass-audience art film. It doesn't entirely succeed, but it's certainly a change from today's standard mysteries and horror movies.

Chicago Tribune Kevin Williams

A gripping drama that will leave thoughtful cinemagoers wrestling with basic Big Questions.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

This movie probably falls within the purview of a "love it/hate it" subgenre of the psychological thriller.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Director John Maybury has a feel for shock rhythms, and he's skillful at keeping you guessing, but after a while you want your questions to cohere into compelling answers, and in The Jacket they don't, quite.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Adrien Brody is cornering the market on roles where he's hunted, haunted and under-nourished.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The Jacket is a confused attempt at headiness that feels like a poor man's "Memento."

Empire Kim Newman

A gripping, affecting, strange movie -- but oddly, it's just like too many other gripping, affecting, strange movies we've seen recently.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

Intermittently compelling but unavoidably improbable.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

This kind of gloomy razzle-dazzle isn't everyone's cup of mind-altering tea, but strong performances make it worth the effort to keep the time-tripping shenanigans straight until the surprisingly satisfying payoff.

LA Weekly Chuck Wilson

The director's work is suitably unnerving, but leaves one feeling beaten senseless by reel two. When the hero's well-earned moment of clarity finally arrives, most will likely be too numbed out to care, despite the best efforts of Brody, an actor too vividly alive to be wasting his time playing dead.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak

Maybury's attempt at a more mainstream movie is really just a simple love story cloaked in a lot of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.

Film Threat Eric Campos

You'll either walk away with a headache,or praising filmmaker John Maybury for his unique narrative...and it is unique, but in my eyes, it's also a big giant mess.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Though shot for maximum moodiness by the gifted Peter Deming ("Mulholland Drive"), the movie straps you in for a head trip that promises hallucinatory wonders but delivers the same old Hollywood formula with sugar on top.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

It draws you into its grim and mysterious world through the first half of the movie, then falls apart like a house of cards in a hurricane.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It's pretty stupid, although it's never exactly boring.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

The Jacket is both a genre movie and a symptom, a gothic treatment of Gulf War syndrome.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

You can sense an impulse toward a better film, and Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley certainly take it seriously, but the time-travel whiplash effect sets in, and it becomes, as so many time travel movies do, an exercise in early entrances, late exits, futile regrets.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Memo to screenwriters cranking out murky existential thrillers: Do not have various characters repeat on several occasions: "I know this doesn't make any sense."

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Doesn't really go anywhere or amount to anything - a fatal flaw in a time-travel movie designed not only to keep you guessing, but to build genuine suspense as well.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The acting makes the difference, and in Jacket it rises above the needs of the material.

Slate David Edelstein

Begins too cruelly and ends too sappily but holds you somewhere between the two extremes until the semisweet finale.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Visually, The Jacket has a lot of flash, but it hardly compensates for the fuzzy story.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Maybury's art-world talents don't include storytelling, and his visceral bursts of fast editing and extreme close-ups don't yield any full-blown characters, narrative, or political vision.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

This movie is terribly silly, but it's not completely terrible.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

Still, the central mystery remains effective and compelling for most of the film, until it becomes clear that it's all image and no intent.

Variety Scott Foundas

A movie as lacking in personality as its amnesiac protagonist.

Village Voice Dennis Lim

A disappointing nosedive into the mainstream for John Maybury, the Derek Jarman acolyte who transitioned successfully from experimental work to features with 1998's hallucinatory Francis Bacon biopic "Love Is the Devil."

New York Post Kyle Smith

The characters are so flat and the dialogue so dull you expect it to be one of those movies whose existence is justified by a big final twist. But it's three days after the screening, and still no twist. Maybe it's coming in the mail?

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

If claustrophobia's your style, The Jacket is a perfect fit.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

The Jacket is doing nothing but sampling elements of "Jacob's Ladder," "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Memento" without offering more than hackneyed solutions, including a rather cheesy conclusion.

San Francisco Chronicle Carla Meyer

[Brody's] mannered performance helps downgrade this picture from a middling sci-fi film to a bad, borderline-camp sci-fi film.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

As bad movies go, The Jacket belongs to a relatively rare but extremely intriguing/irritating genus.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

In this case, the adage would go something like "material, material, material," also known as the Nicolas Cage Rule: Good acting can't overcome bad taste.

The average user rating for this movie is 7.5 (out of 10) based on 37 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Michael D. gave it a4:
This movie was exceptionally bad. Though the acting was passable (especially Kris Kristofferson) the unbelievability of the plot was too much to bear. Time travel from mind drugs? Some things can be changed in the past and some things can't? There's no way of determining it? The "avant-garde" aspects were just a reminder of why a lot of people can't stand avant-garde. It makes no sense. But not in an interesting way, just a senseless way. The only reason I didn't give it a zero is because of the credits song by Roger Eno.

Adam M. gave it a10:
A surprisingly intelligent and well-executed film!

Mark A. gave it a9:
I found the directing and cinematography to be top notch. A riveting film!

Nathan gave it a0:
This movie sucked! Keira Knightley's acting and accent was the worst part. It's one of the worst movies that I've seen in my life.

Frank O. gave it a7:
Innovative flick with outstanding cast but felt like I have seen this plot before.

vanvera gave it a4:
Too much confused. just a little bit shocking view. in any sense.

Marco M. gave it a9:
Absolutely mind-blowing! It should definitely reach top 10 best of this year, I cannot believe it only received a “44” I think that’s extremely underrated. This film makes “The Butterfly Effect” look like one long joke! Adrien Brody gives a great performance that should not disappoint you. Recommend it to anyone who is a fan of such films as “Memento” or “Donnie Darko”.

Jacket, The Warner Independent Pictures

Jacket, The
Warner Independent Pictures