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26
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19
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82
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42
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15
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65
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43
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31
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64
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53
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53
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36
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35
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71
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93
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64
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47
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54
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93
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82
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79
Iron Man
78
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73
Kung Fu Panda
71
Tropic Thunder
71
Horton Hears a Who!
70
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
65
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
64
Wanted
64
Pineapple Express
63
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, The
61
Incredible Hulk, The
60
Traitor
57
Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D
55
House Bunny, The
54
You Don't Mess with the Zohan
54
Get Smart
53
Sex and the City: The Movie
53
Rocker, The
52
Longshots, The
51
Mamma Mia!
51
Step Brothers
49
Hancock
47
Swing Vote
47
X-Files: I Want to Believe, The
43
Meet Dave
42
Death Race
36
Space Chimps
36
Fly Me to the Moon
35
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
35
Mirrors
34
Happening, The
31
Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, The
26
Babylon A.D.
24
Love Guru, The
19
Bangkok Dangerous
15
Disaster Movie
15
College
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

85
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40
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66
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74
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65
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xx
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62
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58
Beautiful Losers
xx
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47
Before the Rains
80
Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
56
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75
Boy A
55
Bra Boys
61
Brick Lane
64
Brideshead Revisited
47
Burn After Reading
61
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49
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54
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xx
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86
Edge of Heaven, The
66
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52
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80
Encounters at the End of the World
26
Everybody Wants to Be Italian
64
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86
Flight of the Red Balloon, The
82
Frozen River
71
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62
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73
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54
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25
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76
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72
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85
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74
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46
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80
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66
Patti Smith: Dream of Life
54
Ping Pong Playa
77
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72
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61
Red
71
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78
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
51
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55
Save Me
73
Secret, A
57
Sixty Six
58
Sukiyaki Western Django
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Trouble the Water
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U2 3D
86
Up the Yangtze
79
Visitor, The
61
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54
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66
When Did You Last See Your Father?
67
XXY
54
Year of the Fish
xx
Young People F**king
75
Young@Heart
89
Man on Wire
86
Edge of Heaven, The
86
Up the Yangtze
86
Flight of the Red Balloon, The
85
Momma's Man
85
Alexandra
83
U2 3D
83
Tell No One
82
Frozen River
81
Trouble the Water
80
Encounters at the End of the World
80
Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
80
Order of Myths, The
79
Visitor, The
78
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
78
Last Mistress, The
77
Pool, The
76
I Served the King of England
75
Young@Heart
75
Boy A
74
Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
74
Mongol
73
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
73
Secret, A
72
Priceless
72
Transsiberian
72
I.O.U.S. A
71
To the Limit
71
Girl Cut in Two, A
71
Roman de gare
70
Love Songs
67
XXY
67
Jellyfish
66
Elegy
66
Patti Smith: Dream of Life
66
American Teen
66
When Did You Last See Your Father?
65
August Evening
64
Brideshead Revisited
64
Fall, The
63
In Search of a Midnight Kiss
63
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
62
Kabluey
62
Mister Foe
62
Baghead
62
Girls Rock!
61
Bustin' Down the Door
61
Wackness, The
61
Man Named Pearl, A
61
Red
61
Brick Lane
58
Beautiful Losers
58
Sukiyaki Western Django
57
Sixty Six
56
Bottle Shock
56
Then She Found Me
55
Save Me
55
Bra Boys
54
Year of the Fish
54
Hamlet 2
54
Ping Pong Playa
54
What We Do Is Secret
54
CSNY: Déjà Vu
52
Elsa & Fred
51
Savage Grace
50
Last Stop for Paul
49
Children of Huang Shi, The
47
Before the Rains
47
Burn After Reading
46
Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer
46
My Mexican Shivah
44
Henry Poole is Here
40
America the Beautiful
26
Everybody Wants to Be Italian
25
Hell Ride
xx
Young People F**king
xx
Bachna Ae Haseeno
xx
Cthulhu
xx
Goal II: Living the Dream
xx
Surfer, Dude
xx
Beer for My Horses
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Terminal, The
DreamWorks Distribution LLC
 |
|
FILM:
MPAA RATING: PG-13 for brief language and drug references
Starring
Tom Hanks,
Catherine Zeta-Jones,
Stanley Tucci,
Chi McBride,
Diego Luna,
Barry Shabaka Henley,
Zoe Saldana,
and
Eddie Jones
The Terminal tells the story of Viktor Navorski (Hanks), a visitor to New York City from Eastern Europe, whose homeland erupts in a fiery coup while he is in the air en route to America. Stranded at John F. Kennedy International Airport with a passport from nowhere, he is unauthorized to actually enter the United States and must improvise his days and nights in the terminal's international transit lounge until the war at home is over. As the weeks and months stretch on, Viktor finds the compressed universe of the terminal to be a richly complex world of absurdity, generosity, ambition, amusement, status, serendipity and even romance with a beautiful flight attendant (Zeta-Jones). (DreamWorks)
| GENRE(S): |
Drama
|
Romance
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Sacha Gervasi (also story)
Jeff Nathanson
Andrew Niccol (story)
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Steven Spielberg
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: November 23, 2004
Video: November 23, 2004
Theatrical: June 18, 2004
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
128 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |

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...
88
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
The movie is a delight in many ways: an unabashed romantic comedy and Capraesque fable that takes Spielberg into realms he's rarely traveled before.

88
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
Like a story-spinner from the "Tales of the Arabian Nights," Steven Spielberg begins by demanding we accept impossible things. If we do, his spell can enchant us; if not, it must vanish like colored smoke.

88
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
A sweet and delicate comedy, a film to make you hold your breath, it is so precisely devised. It has big laughs, but it never seems to make an effort for them.

80
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
Entertainment like this is too hard to find to second-guess for too long.

80
Dallas Observer
Bill Gallo
Thanks to Spielberg's vivid storytelling and Hanks' matchless gift for bringing the common man to life, this is a relentlessly charming movie.

80
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
In a summer of remakes, sequels and movies swollen with effects, The Terminal stands out as a strikingly original comedy.

80
Variety
Scott Foundas
This buoyant, optimistic fable seems to share in the late Ronald Reagan's optimism for America. It does so with the help of a gifted comic ensemble led by Tom Hanks.

80
Empire
Ian Nathan
Far less cuddly than expected, this unusual and elegant movie may have failed to connect with US audiences but it proves Spielberg is currently the most unpredictable director in Hollywood.

75
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
To be savored for its unhurried approach and simple fish-out-of-water story that favors individual character-driven moments over dramatic plot developments.

75
USA Today
Claudia Puig
If moviegoers suspend their disbelief -- easy enough thanks to the diverse and talented cast, as well as Spielberg's capable direction -- they're bound to enjoy this cinematic fantasy.

75
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
As well made, entertaining and seductive a showcase for Hanks as it is, the movie doesn't have a magical impact and doesn't stay with you. And while you're watching it, there's always some slight annoyance, inconsistency or motivational-lapse to slap your face in almost every scene.

75
New York Post
Jonathan Foreman
It's an original, and a gamble, and one of those movies that works better than it should, despite considerable flaws of conception and execution.

75
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
I liked every minute in it. Other films are like empty containers; this one's full. It's full of invention, full of moments, full of business, full of the nuances of human interaction, full of feeling.

75
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
Here's a film made by grown-ups for grown-ups, on grown-up themes of statelessness and belonging. Yet you could show it to a 6-year-old and have him or her understand all the nuances of plot and characterization.

75
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
So beautifully directed, so pleasurable to watch and so thoughtfully put together, it's a disappointment when you realize, halfway through, that the movie is going to fall way short of a masterpiece.

70
The New York Times
Dana Stevens
Rarely have I been so acutely aware of a movie's softness and sentimentality, and rarely have I minded less. Some of the credit surely goes to Mr. Hanks...His performance is so easy and amiable that its nuances emerge only in retrospect.

70
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
Spielberg has made a small and charming story out of The Terminal.

70
LA Weekly
Ella Taylor
The Terminal perfectly captures Spielberg's ambivalent worship of capitalism. His big boy's love of gadgetry is everywhere apparent in the security cameras, blinking computer screens and one-way glass walls.

70
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Keith Phipps
In the latest of a long string of memorable performances, Hanks balances wide-eyed confusion with innate shrewdness, finding a character who's both unfailingly sweet and nobody's fool.

70
New York Magazine
Peter Rainer
Its an odd fable: Viktor is the mysterious visitor who shows us what the American Dream is all about--in the movies terms, compassion for others--without ever wanting to become an American himself. He's a spiritual twin to E.T., who also had trouble phoning home.

70
Film Threat
Rick Kisonak
It may not be great but you're guaranteed to feel great walking out the theater door.

67
Portland Oregonian
Karen Karbo
Hanks is remarkable in one of the minor films in smarm-meister Spielberg's oeuvre.

63
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
It's a hokey piece of melodrama in a movie that cheats its characters - and its audience - out of some emotional truth.

58
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
I didn't mind The Terminal, but I didn't really buy it, either. Spielberg has crafted the film with a proficiency as seamless, and impersonal, as the setting, and you may feel, after a while, that you're longing for your departure time.

50
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
Seeing The Terminal is like experiencing an uneventful flight: The trip was pleasant but not delightful, and youre happy to deplane at the other end.

50
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
There's a thin line between fable and twaddle, and this feel-good trifle veers dangerously close to the latter.

50
Time
Richard Corliss
The Terminal is Spielberg's shortest feature since the first "Jurassic Park," yet it drags, plods, piling one lifeless situation atop another. For all the effort and good intentions, the movie is in-terminal-ble.

50
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
In his sappiest film since 1989's "Always," director Steven Spielberg has come down with a case of the cutes that the whole cast catches.

50
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
Spielberg believes, admirably, that art can grow from love, and vice-versa. But in The Terminal he makes the mistake of insisting on it, repeatedly.

50
The New Yorker
David Denby
The Terminal is highly crafted whimsy; it lacks any compelling reason to exist, and its love story is a dud. Ever bashful when it comes to boy-girl stuff, Spielberg has structured the relationship between Amelia and Viktor to be as asexual as possible.

50
New York Daily News
Jami Bernard
Manages to entertain, and yet, like so many flat-footed attempts at waving the flag, it feels disingenuous and dogmatic.

40
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
As usual Spielberg is too bored by everyday life to use his premise for anything but a fairy tale, whose cheap pathos suggests a bad Chaplin imitation. This grows progressively phonier and eventually devolves into "Mr. Roberts," with Stanley Tucci filling in for James Cagney as an airport bureaucrat.

40
Slate
David Edelstein
Isn't a disaster, but after an entertaining start it congeals into something icky and fake, and it leaves you thinking that Spielberg and his team of screenwriters (Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, from a story by Andrew Niccol and Gervasi) missed the real story.

40
Film Threat
Pete Vonder Haar
There are worse movies out there than The Terminal, but few that feel quite so
unnecessary.

40
Village Voice
J. Hoberman
Making Viktor a Middle Eastern, a South Asian, or even a Bosnian tourist would have given this trite exercise an edge--and a measure of human pathos.

40
The New Republic
Stanley Kauffmann
Even at the low end of the Spielberg spectrum, there has always been some air of ingenuity, some sense of the maker's excitement. Not here. The Terminal plods in spirit and execution.

38
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Rick Groen
The net result is a few shaky laughs and one unwavering sensation -- that The Terminal is interminable.

30
Salon.com
Charles Taylor
Probably the worst-directed film Spielberg has ever made. A peculiarly rhythmless piece of work, it seems to go on forever, though nearly every one of the scenes is cut off before it has been dramatically developed.

30
Washington Post
Stephen Hunter
Hanks is great; the movie isn't.

30
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
The Terminal is a terminally fraudulent and all-but-interminable comedy.
25
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
As he showed in the recent "Catch Me if You Can," also a Hanks vehicle, Spielberg has little talent for emotional realism, not to mention psychological suspense. He should scurry back to "Jurassic Park" as soon as the next flight leaves.


The average user rating for this movie is 7.2 (out of 10) based on 97 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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