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76
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60
9
17
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37
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53
Astro Boy
66
Bandslam
45
Box, The
61
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55
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43
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
66
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29
Collector, The
23
Couples Retreat
80
District 9
61
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39
Fame
30
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34
Fourth Kind, The
60
Funny People
32
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
27
Gamer
41
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39
Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, The
46
Halloween II
73
Hangover, The
78
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
55
I Can Do Bad All By Myself
66
Informant!, The
69
Inglourious Basterds
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
66
Julie & Julia
34
Law Abiding Citizen
33
Love Happens
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
51
My Sister's Keeper
42
Orphan
28
Pandorum
63
Perfect Getaway, A
86
Ponyo![]()
35
Post Grad
48
Proposal, The
30
Saw VI
53
Shorts
24
Sorority Row
83
Star Trek![]()
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
55
Taking Woodstock
47
Time Traveler's Wife
96
Toy Story/Toy Story 2 3D![]()
35
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
28
Ugly Truth, The
88
Up![]()
71
Where the Wild Things Are
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
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58
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96
35 Shots of Rum![]()
56
Adam
72
Adela
39
Adventures of Power
78
Afghan Star
61
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66
Afterschool
xx
All the Best
58
American Casino
72
Amreeka
48
Antichrist
73
Araya
62
Art & Copy
55
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76
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86
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13
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70
Beeswax
35
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
71
Big Fan
66
Black Dynamite
51
Blind Date
xx
Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
76
Bliss
35
Blue Tooth Virgin, The
26
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
57
Boys Are Back, The
45
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81
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70
Bronson
45
Burning Plain, The
xx
Carriers
55
Casi Divas
57
Chelsea on the Rocks
62
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
69
Cold Souls
59
Collapse
44
Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
82
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75
Crude
82
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67
Departures
xx
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71
Disgrace
xx
Do Knot Disturb
70
Earth Days
24
Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat
85
Education, An![]()
55
Endgame
xx
Eulogy for a Vampire
xx
Everyone Else
xx
Fatal Promises
56
Fifty Dead Men Walking
62
Five Minutes of Heaven
74
Flame & Citron
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
28
Free Style
xx
From Mexico with Love
50
Fuel
25
Gentlemen Broncos
50
Give Me Your Hand
58
Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
72
Good Hair
89
Goodbye Solo![]()
52
Grace
64
Harmony and Me
81
Headless Woman, The![]()
xx
Heretics, The
63
Horse Boy, The
73
House of the Devil, The
xx
How to Seduce Difficult Women
74
Humpday
94
Hurt Locker, The![]()
29
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
16
If One Thing Matters: A Film About Wolfgang Tillmans
75
In Search of Beethoven
83
In the Loop![]()
61
Intimate Enemies
42
Irene in Time
70
It Might Get Loud
46
Killing Kasztner
19
Labor Day
xx
Laila's Birthday
41
Little Ashes
41
Little Traitor, The
66
Liverpool
34
Looking for Palladin
80
Lorna's Silence
83
Maid, The![]()
xx
Ministers, The
59
More Than a Game
67
Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, The
34
Motherhood
62
My One and Only
xx
Mystery Team
48
New York, I Love You
73
Night and Day
66
No Impact Man
47
Ong Bak 2: The Beginning
34
Other Man, The
xx
Painter Sam Francis, The
54
Paper Heart
xx
Paradise
68
Paranormal Activity
68
Paris
44
Peter and Vandy
35
Play the Game
77
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
xx
Pretty Ugly People
65
Providence Effect, The
76
Rembrandt's J'accuse
69
September Issue, The
79
Serious Man, A
40
Shrink
61
Skin
77
Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, A
xx
Skiptracers
46
Splinterheads
39
St. Trinian's
89
Still Walking![]()
50
Stoning of Soraya M., The
55
Storm
65
Tetro
70
That Evening Sun
72
Thirst
xx
Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D (re-release)
61
Trucker
xx
Turning Green
83
U2 3D![]()
66
Unmade Beds
66
Unmistaken Child
70
Visual Acoustics
55
Walt & El Grupo
67
Way We Get By, The
69
We Live in Public
64
Wedding Song, The
64
Where is Where?
xx
White on Rice
74
Woman in Berlin, A
69
World's Greatest Dad
70
Yes Men Fix the World
69
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
xx
You, the Living
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Royal Tenenbaums, The

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 33 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 126 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
Wes Anderson
Owen Wilson
Directed by: Wes Anderson
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 14, 2001
DVD: July 9, 2002
Running Time: 108 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for some language, sexuality/nudity and drug content
Starring Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Danny Glover, and Bill Murray
The story of the Tenenbaum family's sudden, unexpected reunion one recent winter. (Touchstone Pictures)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Bottle Rocket Rushmore The Darjeeling Limited The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
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...
Village Voice J. Hoberman
May not be the movie of the year, but it is a seasonal gift to us all. Sweet and funny, doggedly oddball if bordering precious.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Ron Wells
A very funny and painfully relevant two hours of entertainment.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Anderson offers no phony uplift for the Tenenbaums or for audiences. But he does know how to take a sad song and make it better. In these troubled times, that's a gift.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Manohla Dargis
In a film that verges on greatness, it is a sign of terrific faith, as well as of Anderson's promise as a director, that when one of the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums wears hospital pajamas after a detour into grief, the words over his heart read "recovery area."
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
A big generational saga that woos the audience with its humor, spirit, style, and ability. Genius here is an evolutionary thing.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Exists on a knife edge between comedy and sadness. There are big laughs, and then quiet moments when we're touched.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Mark Caro
More flat-out funny than "Rushmore," but in neither film is the humor joke-based. What you're laughing at is the behavior of characters who are so fixed in their idiosyncratic worldviews that they can't help but careen into each other like out-of-control bumper cars.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Connie Ogle
Once you're among them, the Tenenbaums -- and Anderson -- cast quite a spell.
Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
A devastatingly funny portrait of a wildly dysfunctional clan, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums is a movie about how people never really mature in ways that matter.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
The performances are all terrific, but Gene Hackman is close to a career best as the family patriarch Royal, the most useless man you can't help loving.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
Underachieves in its own way by trapping an expansive, probing story in a brittle, highly artificial style that constricts character and emotional development.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
It's a B+, not an A. This would be enough for most filmmakers. But Anderson must contend with a higher standard. It's his fault for being original.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Rita Kempley
This is not a movie that wraps up its story in a tidy bow, but it's a lot more fun than most of the ones that do.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
Hackman gives the con-man lines a simple, straight-ahead urgency that makes the man first hilarious and then, as the pleasures of human company are withdrawn and his resentment begins to bubble up, inexplicably touching. This is a great performance.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
Spend an eveing with some of Edward Gorey's writings and drawings, rub against the velvet of his lugubrious wit, and you will be ready for Royal and the clan. [17 Dec 2001, p. 97]
Time Richard Schickel
For Hackman embodies the energy and outrage the rest of this rather twee family lacks. Royal stirs them all to life, and this great, bumptious performance by an actor gleefully rediscovering his funny bone stirs us to appreciative life too.
Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Anderson's cinematic style gets more adventurous from one movie to the next, and he begins this story with bursts of originality that leave his respected "Rushmore" far behind.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Might have been about the rise and fall of a family of gifted children. That would have been the typical way to approach the story. Instead, it's something rare -- a movie about people who have already fallen, whose best days are behind them.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
It makes for chuckling entertainment and it's fun to watch as it's happening. But its New York characters are not a bit believable, there's no real bite to the humor, and the film never adds up to be more than the sum of its parts.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
Isn't nearly the landmark comedy it thinks it is, but its quirkiness should appeal to the highbrow funny bone in all of us.
The New York Times Dana Stevens
At once endearing and unbearably show-offy, it seems to be the product of a sensibility formed by age-inappropriate reading.
Read Full Review >New Times (L.A.) Robert Wilonsky
One expects more from writer-director Wes Anderson (and his co-scribbler, Owen Wilson) than such frivolous fun that bears no lingering effect.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Over the course of 108 minutes, The Royal Tenenbaums drops downward on the humor scale from hilarious to funny to quirky to pretentiously bizarre to chaotic.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
The film grows on you, but more substance and less calculated quirks would have been a royal treat.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Jay Carr
There are laughs in it. But mostly you sit around waiting for it to be funnier, or at least funny more often. The problem is that it hasn't figured out a way to be funny while satisfyingly accommodating the pain in these characters.
Newsweek David Ansen
In the antic, melancholy comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, the singular Wes Anderson (Rushmore) abandons his native Texas for a storybook vision of New York.
New York Magazine Peter Rainer
Anderson is something of a prodigy himself, and he's riddled with talent, but he hasn't figured out how to be askew and heartfelt at the same time. When he does, he'll probably make the movie The Royal Tenenbaums was meant to be, and it'll be a sight to see.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Absurdist, but also condescending and self-infatuated; The Royal Tenenbaums is at least three times too clever for its own good.
Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Director Wes Anderson, who also co-wrote the "Royal" script with actor Owen Wilson, unquestionably has one of America's most distinctive filmmaking sensibilities, but that is part of the problem. As my mother used to say, too good is no good.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Anderson's other hallmarks here are brilliant gags that deflate in the execution, potentially interesting characters that end up so flat they feel as if they'd been cut out of paper, a plot that's all setup and no story.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.9 (out of 10) based on 126 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Patrick B gave it a10:
If you want a movie filled with cheap laughs,silly slapstick humor, or fart jokes, don't watch this movie! It's a sophisticated comedy/drama that makes me teary even after watching it dozens of times. The acting is spot on, the soundtrack is superb, and Wes Anderson's directing has never been so flawless. This is my favorite movie and it deserves to be worshiped.
Harry gave it a9:
This movie snuck by me and i never knew it was in theaters, but i watched it on comedy central and it was great.
Wes M. gave it a9:
Hipster sensibility wears a bit, but it's consistently funny.
[Anonymous] gave it a9:
Only to be topped by Rushmore, this film is Wes Anderson at his finest. I could not believe that 0 I saw on ROYAL T.'s review. It also saddens me that somebody could see this movie and not thoroughly enjoy it.
[Anonymous] gave it a9:
Only to be topped by Rushmore, this film is Wes Anderson at his finest. I could not believe that 0 I saw on ROYAL T.'s review. It also saddens me that somebody could see this movie and not thoroughly enjoy it.
Emma G. gave it a9:
Simply delightful! i enjoyed every minute of this splendid film and the splendid acting in it. one of the funniest and best films ive ever seen
[Anonymous] gave it a10:
I guess all the people that gave it low scores must be into comedy movies like "Harold and Kumar go to white castle"...nice. just because you didn't understand it or there weren't large explosions or jokes about boobs doesn't mean it was a bad movie. get culture people...get culture.
