Advanced Search >
Help Me Search

Movies

Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores

Wide Releases
Now In Theaters

sort by namesort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Limited Releases
Now In Theaters

sort by namesort by score

58 (Untitled)
96 35 Shots of Rum
56 Adam
72 Adela
39 Adventures of Power
78 Afghan Star
61 After the Storm
66 Afterschool
xx All the Best
58 American Casino
72 Amreeka
48 Antichrist
73 Araya
62 Art & Copy
55 As Seen Through These Eyes
76 Baader Meinhof Complex, The
86 Beaches of Agnes, The
13 Beautiful Life, A
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 Bright Star
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 Cove, The
75 Crude
82 Damned United, The
67 Departures
xx Dil Bole Hadippa
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.

Stepford Wives, The

EMAILPRINTParamount Pictures

Stepford Wives, The reviews
42
3.2 User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 40 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 57 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >

Movie Info

Genre(s): Comedy  |  Drama  |  Musical  |  Suspense/Thriller

Written by: Paul Rudnick
Ira Levin (book)

Directed by: Frank Oz

Release Date:
Theatrical: June 11, 2004
DVD: November 9, 2004

Running Time: 93 minutes, Color

Origin: USA

Summary

RATING: PG-13 for sexual content, thematic material and language

Starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Christopher Walken, Faith Hill, Glenn Close, Roger Bart, and Jon Lovitz

Stepford has a secret. All of the wives are far too perfect, and all of the husbands are way too happy. The Stepford Wives is a sophisticated and comic re-imagining of the 1975 suspense classic. Welcome to Stepford -- the American way of love. (Paramount Pictures)

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...

80

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Contrary to recent rumors that it was a dud, the new Stepford Wives, with its chocolate-box visual style, archly heavy-handed foreshadowing and its scene-for-scene parody of the original's fright strategies (Walken's waxy menace is once again played for laughs), is a gas.

Read Full Review >
80

Newsweek Cathleen McGuigan

Glenn Close, Bette Midler and Roger Bart (who plays one half of a gay couple slated for Stepfordizing) are hilarious, and even Nicole Kidman flashes comedic gifts not seen since "To Die For."

Read Full Review >
75

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

It's hilarious -- and on purpose, too. This is the first satisfying adult summer comedy set in New England to come out of Hollywood since "The Witches of Eastwick" in 1987.

Read Full Review >
75

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

The star of this overachieving trifle is not Kidman, it's Paul Rudnick. The New York playwright and screenwriter ("In & Out") has taken a pair of dated watermarks from the '70s - Ira Levin's horror novel and its faithful 1975 movie adaptation - and turned them into a broad, feverishly fey parody.

Read Full Review >
75

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The 1975 movie tilted toward horror instead of comedy. Now here's a version that tilts the other way, and I like it a little better.

Read Full Review >
70

Time Richard Corliss

A film full of smart laughs.

Read Full Review >
70

Slate David Edelstein

I had a fabulous time. Well, I did once I accepted that it was a campfest--a great Provincetown drag show of The Stepford Wives.

Read Full Review >
63

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Trying to be more antic and cuttingly funny, it misses the premise's shivery tension. The story loses us at precisely the moment it should put us in the vise.

Read Full Review >
63

USA Today Mike Clark

You feel some of the strain in this immaculately shot, designed and costumed farce, but it's fast and the cast is lively, even though a lost-looking Broderick rarely gets to shoot his patented bewildered look.

Read Full Review >
60

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Because the entire audience knows what's going on, the filmmakers hope to distract viewers from storytelling weaknesses with an urgent sense of style.

Read Full Review >
60

Variety Brian Lowry

Another "remake" that merits the title in name only, The Stepford Wives isn't the "troubled" disaster that media reports have suggested it might be, yet nor do its oddly matched parts ever congeal into a fully formed creation.

Read Full Review >
60

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

If the filmmakers had made a point of satirizing the new makeover culture in ways that went beyond camp jibes at décor and suburbia, they might have come up with a classic.

Read Full Review >
60

Empire Kim Newman

It’s funny, wonderfully performed by all, visually inventive.

Read Full Review >
58

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The film's creepier moments are pathetically weak, and its thematic update fails to attain the minimal credibility that even a wild farce needs to sustain itself.

Read Full Review >
50

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

At no time do the men -- that is, the straight ones -- believably hold the upper hand. In the new town of Stepford, there's no bitterness, no struggle, no competition, none of the scars of the sexual revolution. There's just gay apparel.

Read Full Review >
50

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Great casting ideas, like Glenn Close and Christopher Walken as "the King and Queen of Stepford," don't pay off, because the filmmakers' increasingly desperate twists alter the basis of the characters.

Read Full Review >
50

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Close gets laughs, as does Bette Midler as a Jewish rebel. But the sting is gone.

Read Full Review >
50

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Isn't so much bad as it is puny: a sporadically amusing, occasionally funny, but ultimately bland and pointless time killer.

Read Full Review >
50

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Only Close, in a majestically, maniacally brittle demonstration of Stepford overdrive, has the courage to show how nutty the pursuit of domestic perfection is. In this mess of a film, she is perfection.

Read Full Review >
50

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Before it degenerates into a complete mess, it's an entertaining mess, and something about its willingness to please maintains the audience's goodwill throughout.

Read Full Review >
50

New York Post Megan Lehmann

Boasts a stellar ensemble cast and some priceless one-liners -- but those pearls of acerbic wit have been strung together on a cheap piece of thread which almost inevitably breaks in the third act.

Read Full Review >
40

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

The picture is mildly entertaining and stringently unoffensive (provided you're not a supersensitive upper-crusty type from Connecticut). Yet it has problems from the start.

Read Full Review >
40

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Almost desperate to show it gets its own point. What's funny is that the joke--"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" reconfigured as anti-feminist backlash--was scarcely fresh when Bryan Forbes shot the first movie version nearly 30 years ago.

Read Full Review >
40

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

It was somebody's nitwit idea to rip out the story's guts and brains for a sour sellout of a finale -- which finds the filmmakers behaving exactly like Stepford men and turning an original into a dummy.

Read Full Review >
40

The New York Times Dana Stevens

It does manage to fire off a handful of decent jokes and a few sneaky insights before losing its nerve and collapsing into incoherence.

Read Full Review >
40

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to be--Rudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation.

Read Full Review >
38

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

A Frankenstein's monster of a movie: clumsy, patched together from parts that don't align properly, desperate to be loved, destined to be chased by mobs with pitchforks - those will be the critics - until it stumbles into its grave.

Read Full Review >
38

ReelViews James Berardinelli

If the film is to work on any level, even a comedic one, it's necessary for the viewers to sympathize with Joanna and Walter. However, the script and scattershot performances keep them at arm's length. Nicole Kidman is in full scenery-chewing mode, and Matthew Broderick hasn't been this invisible since Ferris Bueller had to go back to school.

Read Full Review >
38

Premiere Peter Debruge

Close is the best and worst thing about the film, delivering a performance that upstages even Christopher Walken (!), taking her over-the-top Cruella de Vil turn to its saccharine-sweet opposite.

Read Full Review >
30

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Rudnick is a wit, and his script allows everyone a decent one-liner or two. But the problem with one-liners is that they only last one line, leaving a whole movie around them that needs filling in.

Read Full Review >
30

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

Lured to the project with John Cusack as her original co-star (cruelly replaced by Matthew Broderick), Nicole Kidman phones it in.

Read Full Review >
30

Film Threat Kevin Carr

The story and themes behind The Stepford Wives are way past their time. They’re products of the 1960s.

Read Full Review >
30

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

None of it appears to be well thought out, or thought through, and it's consequently never remotely believable.

Read Full Review >
30

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The movie takes a desperately wrong turn about 45 minutes in, and you can almost hear the great sucking sound as the whole thing churns down the drain in a swirl of narrative contradictions.

Read Full Review >
30

Washington Post Desson Thomson

The result: an empty comedy that takes hackneyed potshots at consumerism.

Read Full Review >
25

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The film contains so many endings that it's hard to tell what impressions the filmmakers want us to leave the theater with. Buy a copy of the book instead. It remains an excellent read.

Read Full Review >
25

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

There is no tonal consistency from scene to scene, swinging from domestic drama to farce. Most of the actors -- especially Matthew Broderick -- look lost.

Read Full Review >
25

Portland Oregonian Karen Karbo

So god-awful it falls into the category of needing to be seen to be believed. A purported satire of the 1975 camp horror classic, it succeeds in failing on almost every level, including knowing what it's actually satirizing.

Read Full Review >
20

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Misbegotten is the only way to describe this remake of the 1975 film based on Ira Levin's cultural-zeitgeist novel.

Read Full Review >
10

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

A pitiful shambles of a remake, The Stepford Wives might have qualified as a rethinking of the 1975 original if there were any trace of coherent thought in the finished product.

What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 3.2 (out of 10) based on 57 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Nick A. gave it a1:
Well what an insult to the original, I don't care if people say this is a different take or that this is just a bit of cheesy fun, if you're going to call yourselves a remake of a film then for god sakes stick to the elements that made the original so splendid. I mean how can you take such a good cast and turn out this pile of crap. This goes down in my lists of remakes that should never see the light of day ever again.

joe s. gave it a10:
My favorite movie.

Nicole gave it a0:
To begin, I am a Kidman fan and I also enjoyed the original Stepford Wives movie. Because of the previews, I did not expect this movie to be great, and was surprised when it turned out to be FAR worse than I thought. The revised plot is terrible, the "acting" is insulting, and the ending is ridiculous. I advise you to save yourself. It is not worth the time or effort to see - not even on cable.

Peter J. gave it a3:
I rented this movie because my wife wanted to see it, so I was not expecting much at all. I expected it to be bad, and sure enough, it was. The biggest thing that bothered me was the casting. Kidman and Broderick do not go together at all. Bad chemistry. The rest of the movie was truly a bore, even my wife fell alseep. Again, I wasn't expecting much, so I can't say I was disappointed at all.

Kevin E. gave it a4:
Just keep telling yourself, 'It's about the art direction." and you might make it through. Really uneven, starts out cringe-ingly bad with Kidman mugging up a storm at her firing, picks up with the arrival of Glenn Close, falters again, picks up again with the arrival of Roger Bart as Stepford's flamingest newcomer, falters again, Midler valiantly rescues it, Walken buries it again... and on and on. A few surprisingly good, comic moments but mostly a mess. No one bothered to decide whether or not the robots were separate from or the same as the original human that was tinkered with (details!).

Ilze S. gave it a 1:
This movie was so stupid. I liked only Nicole Kidman. So empty!

Abby H. & Amy B. gave it a 7:
Amy: Good & Okay Abby: Liked It. Interesting, but not as good as the original.

Read more user comments >

Popular on CBS sites: SEC Football | NFL | Video Game Cheats | iPhone | Video Game Reviews | Notebooks | Antivirus Software

About CBS Interactive | Jobs | Advertise

© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use