Movies
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Wide Releases
Now In Theaters
76
(500) Days of Summer
49
2012
60
9
17
All About Steve
37
Amelia
53
Astro Boy
70
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
52
Blind Side
47
Box, The
61
Capitalism: A Love Story
55
Christmas Carol, A
43
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
66
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
23
Couples Retreat
39
Fame
30
Final Destination, The
34
Fourth Kind, The
41
G-Force
46
Halloween II
73
Hangover, The
78
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
66
Informant!, The
69
Inglourious Basterds
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
66
Julie & Julia
34
Law Abiding Citizen
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
28
Pandorum
58
Pirate Radio
39
Planet 51
30
Saw VI
53
Shorts
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
46
Twilight Saga: New Moon, The
71
Where the Wild Things Are
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Limited Releases
Now In Theaters
58
(Untitled)
96
35 Shots of Rum![]()
56
Adam
39
Adventures of Power
66
Afterschool
73
Amreeka
49
Antichrist
76
Baader Meinhof Complex, The
86
Beaches of Agnes, The![]()
71
Big Fan
65
Black Dynamite
76
Bliss
26
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
44
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81
Bright Star![]()
76
Broken Embraces
70
Bronson
62
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
69
Cold Souls
60
Collapse
82
Cove, The![]()
75
Crude
82
Damned United, The![]()
53
Dare
50
Defamation
67
Departures
70
Earth Days
85
Education, An![]()
55
Endgame
88
Fantastic Mr. Fox![]()
31
Fix
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
xx
From Mexico with Love
28
Gentlemen Broncos
72
Good Hair
89
Goodbye Solo![]()
63
Horse Boy, The
74
House of the Devil, The
xx
How to Seduce Difficult Women
26
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
70
It Might Get Loud
46
Killing Kasztner
43
Little Traitor, The
34
Looking for Palladin
80
Lorna's Silence
46
Love Hurts
84
Maid, The![]()
45
Mammoth
75
Messenger, The
55
Missing Person, The
59
More Than a Game
34
Motherhood
62
My One and Only
48
New York, I Love You
66
No Impact Man
26
Oh My God
68
Paranormal Activity
68
Paris
79
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
73
Red Cliff
69
September Issue, The
79
Serious Man, A
65
Skin
41
Splinterheads
42
Staten Island
50
Stoning of Soraya M., The
58
Storm
82
Sun, The![]()
49
Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
73
That Evening Sun
61
Trucker
49
Turning Green
83
U2 3D![]()
45
Uncertainty
67
Visual Acoustics
32
War on Kids
67
Way We Get By, The
65
Wedding Song, The
xx
White on Rice
59
William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
74
Woman in Berlin, A
43
Women in Trouble
69
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Jacket, The
EMAILPRINTWarner Independent Pictures

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 35 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 38 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Suspense/Thriller
Written by:
Massy Tadjedin
Tom Bleecker (story)
Marc Rocco (story)
Directed by: John Maybury
Release Date:
Theatrical: March 4, 2005
DVD: June 21, 2005
Running Time: 102 minutes, Color
Origin: USA / UK
Summary
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)
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...
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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Kevin Williams
A gripping drama that will leave thoughtful cinemagoers wrestling with basic Big Questions.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
This movie probably falls within the purview of a "love it/hate it" subgenre of the psychological thriller.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
Adrien Brody is cornering the market on roles where he's hunted, haunted and under-nourished.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
The Jacket is a confused attempt at headiness that feels like a poor man's "Memento."
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
Intermittently compelling but unavoidably improbable.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
It's pretty stupid, although it's never exactly boring.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
The Jacket is both a genre movie and a symptom, a gothic treatment of Gulf War syndrome.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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."
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
The acting makes the difference, and in Jacket it rises above the needs of the material.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
Begins too cruelly and ends too sappily but holds you somewhere between the two extremes until the semisweet finale.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Visually, The Jacket has a lot of flash, but it hardly compensates for the fuzzy story.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
This movie is terribly silly, but it's not completely terrible.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Variety Scott Foundas
A movie as lacking in personality as its amnesiac protagonist.
Read Full Review >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."
Read Full Review >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?
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
As bad movies go, The Jacket belongs to a relatively rare but extremely intriguing/irritating genus.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.6 (out of 10) based on 38 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”.
