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Royal Tenenbaums, The
Touchstone Pictures


6.7

based on 33 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 118 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

FILM:

MPAA 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)

GENRE(S):	Drama
WRITTEN BY:	Wes Anderson Owen Wilson
DIRECTED BY:	Wes Anderson
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: July 9, 2002 Video: July 9, 2002 Theatrical: December 14, 2001
RUNNING TIME:	108 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

Gene Hackman received a Golden Globe for his lead performance.

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

New York Post Lou Lumenick

You'll laugh, you'll cry -- the year's best movie.

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.

Film Threat Ron Wells

A very funny and painfully relevant two hours of entertainment.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Far and away the funniest comedy in town.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The film grows on you, but more substance and less calculated quirks would have been a royal treat.

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.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Precociously glib and never less than engaging.

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.

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.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.7 (out of 10) based on 118 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

[Anonoymous] 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.

Royal T. gave it a0:
This movie was a waste of time. A sad commentary that anyone would consider giving this anything higher than a 1. Drivel.

David p gave it a10:
Perfect. This movie is a perfect example of Wes Anderson's vision coming to life completely through absolute control and superb acting. "You wanna talk some jive?"

Michael L. gave it a5:
Quirky, surprising and off-beat... sounds like a Wes Anderson film, right?... Packed with some solid stars (both comedic and straight-laced), 'The Royal Tenenbaums' is a delightful and much slanted look at the coessential dysfunctional family that could be from Anywhere, USA. Well, actually it could be from anywhere in the galaxy as you may not come across a more strange slew of characters in one place anywhere on God's green earth. For openers, Gene Hackman plays a hysterical deadbeat dad who had been alienated by the rest of his bizarre family for ignorance to them and vulgarity to others which can include even us the audience. Yet at the same time the viewer will be sympathetic to him and his mischievous routine and rebellious nature given his sly warmheartedness and charm. The trio of the children's life stories (wild and wholly tales portrayed in retrospect and real-time by Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow & Luke Wilson) surround this rude and complex father shortcomings in spectacular fashion while combative yet dignified mom played by Angelica Houston is a steady presence amongst the chaos. Owen Wilson and Bill Murray round out the supporting cast for this fun-filled comedy. It's a good idea to screen early Anderson efforts like Rushmore and/or Bottle Rocket to prep for the amount of quirkiness thrown at you in this romp but designed to even challenge the zaniest of viewers on its own.

Tony P. gave it a0:
This is the worst film I have ever seen in my life. Only White Noise and The Weather Man come close to as bad as this.

R D. gave it a10:
Very funny and touching. It is funnier than sex comedies which have only 6-7 big laughs. This has very consistent small but smart laughs.

Mike F. gave it a10:
One of my favorite movies ever made -- hilarious, touching, weird, and beautiful, with great visuals, fantastic music, snappy writing, and that ephemeral otherness that is the hallmark of true art. I sometimes wish I'd never seen it so I could see it again for the first time.

Royal Tenenbaums, The Touchstone Pictures

Royal Tenenbaums, The
Touchstone Pictures