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64
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63
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62
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60
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58
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58
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57
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57
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57
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55
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54
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54
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53
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53
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52
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51
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49
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47
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47
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46
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45
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43
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43
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43
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41
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39
Nights in Rodanthe
37
Miracle at St. Anna
36
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36
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36
Fly Me to the Moon
35
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35
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
35
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34
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27
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26
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24
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20
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15
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81
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80
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80
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78
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72
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72
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Lower Learning
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
DreamWorks SKG
FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for aberrant behavior involving nudity, violence, sexuality, and disturbing images
Starring
Ben Whishaw,
Dustin Hoffman,
Alan Rickman,
Rachel Hurd-Wood,
and
John Hurt
Based on Patrick Suskind's best-selling novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is set in Paris and revolves around an eccentric 18th century murderer with an extraordinary sense of smell.
| GENRE(S): |
Crime
|
Drama
|
Foreign
|
Suspense/Thriller
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Andrew Birkin
Bernd Eichinger
Tom Tykwer
Patrick Süskind (novel Das Parfum)
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Tom Tykwer
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: July 24, 2007
Theatrical: December 29, 2006
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
147 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
Germany / France / Spain |

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...
100
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
This is a dark, dark, dark film, focused on an obsession so complete and lonely it shuts out all other human experience. You may not savor it, but you will not stop watching it, in horror and fascination.

88
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
Most horror movies try to show us the man inside the monster, so we'll empathize with his moral dilemmas or feel his suffering. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer shows us a man who is all monster, whose colossal amorality makes him a potential Messiah or menace to humanity.

83
Portland Oregonian
Marc Mohan
Whishaw's oddly charismatic performance makes the despicable Grenouille into an almost sympathetic antihero. The rather astonishing finale will likely have audiences either howling in derision or ardently dissecting afterward. And it must have given the bluenoses at the MPAA fits.

83
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
The film is downright repulsive in places, and otherwise pushes the envelope for an art film, but it's a dazzling piece of filmmaking that wins us over with its boldness and artistry.

80
Empire
Dan Jolin
The odd conclusion renders it somewhat oblique, but Perfume is a feast for the senses.

80
Film Threat
Rick Kisonak
Tykwer makes of all this murder and madness a concoction of improbable beauty and rare artistry. "Perfume" is not just the finest film of his career but easily one of the past year's most accomplished.

75
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
It is to director Tykwer's credit that, although you never come close to understanding Jean-Baptiste, you don't turn your nose up at him, either.

75
Premiere
Ethan Alter
Perfume is sure to annoy as many moviegoers as it entertains, but at least even the naysayers would find it difficult to argue that film is nothing if not a departure from the ordinary.

75
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
This is a crazy, gorgeous, disturbing, darkly comic horror story about an early-18th-century Frenchman born in a Paris fish market without any odor of his own but with a sense of smell that would make a pack of bloodhounds wail with envy.

75
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, crosses over from thriller into magic realism for a lavishly staged climax that's a bit much.

75
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Perfume misses some of the subtler base notes of Süskind's creepier, more self-aware original, but Whishaw and Tykwer blend the movie into something quite heady in its own bottle.

70
The Hollywood Reporter
Bernard Besserglik
Long regarded as unfilmable, Patrick Suskind's 1985 novel "Perfume" has finally reached the screen in a blockbuster production that succeeds reasonably well in achieving what many said was beyond the scope of cinema: conveying the world of scent and smell.

70
Variety
Derek Elley
The seductive, sensory prose of Patrick Suskind's bestseller, "Perfume," reaches the screen with loads of visual panache but only intermittent magic.

70
Salon.com
Andrew O'Hehir
A memorable and outrageous movie, but one more likely to be remembered as a massive folly than a whopping success.

63
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
Deeply flawed though it may be, Perfume is a challenging motion picture, and one whose impressions are not easily shaken.

63
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
The film, though admirably ambitious, is resolutely earthbound, mired in ick and slime and never more wooden than in the delirious climax.

63
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
Perfume is a pitch-black period epic of squalor and enterprise.

60
Village Voice
Ed Halter
It's a noble experiment in pushing the limits of cinema, but Tykwer never achieves true profundity.

58
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Nathan Rabin
Perfume is ultimately an unmistakable failure, but there's a strange majesty to its epic overreaching. It can be faulted for many things, but not for lacking the courage of its convictions.

50
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
Weaves a sensual spell of extraordinary delicacy, then sustains it -- up to a point.
50
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and cowriters Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger preserve some of the novel's storytelling flair, and Dustin Hoffman does a swell turn as the antihero's Italian mentor. But despite a fairly spectacular climax, the material's generic limitations eventually catch up with the plot.

50
Chicago Tribune
Michael Phillips
By the time Perfume arrives at its ridiculous mass orgy, staged at the gallows where Grenouille is supposed to meet his end, you really would rather see him meet his end than endure a ridiculous mass orgy.

50
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
It's simultaneously arty, arcane and nasty.

50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Jennie Punter
While Tom Tykwer's lavish and lively screen adaptation of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is certainly not a stinker, there is something decidedly off about it.

50
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
There are sniff movies and there are snuff movies, but Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is both. It has the bouquet of balm and blood. Imagine "Fragrance of the Lambs."

40
Austin Chronicle
Marc Savlov
Tykwer's camera can assault the audience with the rankest of imagery, but not even once does it come close to distilling the actual aroma of the abattoir that was 18th-century France. And for that, I suppose, we should all be thankful.

40
Los Angeles Times
Carina Chocano
What's missing is less a sense of the protagonist's inner nose (which is very well-trammeled) as a sense of his inner life, motivation or desire.

30
The New York Times
A.O. Scott
Try as it might to be refined and provocative, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer never rises above the pedestrian creepiness of its conceit.

25
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
This isn't pleasant to watch. Neither is it amusing, intellectually engaging, whimsically fascinating, coldly satirical or painfully poignant, though at any given moment in this erratic film director Tom Tykwer might be trying for one of these conflicting tones.

25
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
Perfume offers eau de crud.


The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 42 User Votes
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