Vanilla Sky

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

A mostly fascinating, often frustrating, boldly uncommercial Hollywood version of a boldly uncommercial art film. It's very atypical of the previous work of both director and star, and it's as personal a film, I suspect, as Cruise will ever make.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

It's a film that you can take home and chew over later, both abrasive in its loudness and reflective in its fleeting, feminine moments of silence. Well done.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

An involving, sweetly touching love story, buoyed by Crowe's natural, poetic dialogue and his knack for writing characters (especially women) who feel like real people instead of plot devices.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

This is the kind of movie you don't want to analyze until you've seen it two times. Now that I've seen it twice, I think I understand it, or maybe not. Certainly it's entertaining as it rolls along.

Variety Todd McCarthy

The picture has vitality, a fine cast and excellent craft

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Crowe's tantalizing film sticks with you.

USA Today Mike Clark

What works in a quirky foreign film can look silly with expansive Hollywood treatment. Crowe is smart enough to know this, so it's baffling he chose Vanilla over richer cinematic tastes.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Visually dazzling but ultimately dizzying ride, a trippy suspenser that gets tripped up on its own deja vu voodoo.

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

Crowe's chilliest movie. In part this is by design. Like "Open Your Eyes," to which Crowe is mostly faithful, Vanilla Sky is a head trip that merges thriller, romance and science-fiction elements while playing with our notions of dreams and reality.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Has moments that are eerily beautiful and genuinely moving -- and some that are surprisingly vulgar.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

I admire Cameron Crowe for daring to write and direct a movie as strange as Vanilla Sky. I lament the casting of Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz in the leads.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

It reeks of unearned profundity, but I found it entertaining.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Lost in this beguiling labyrinth, Vanilla Sky is more fascinating as a bit of evidence than as a movie -- and ultimately less pleasing than most audiences will want.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Like an over-packed three-scoop cone -- it melts into a mess while we're still slurping away.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

For better or worse, Vanilla Sky is a genuine, albeit jejune, statement of star consciousness -- blustery with self-awe and feverish with cataclysmic self-doubt.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

The film's aim -- to dazzle and inspire -- is sapped by Cruise's vein-popping, running-the-marathon performance.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Crowe, for his part, is decency itself, but unlike Amenábar he's a pop romantic with no stomach or aptitude for noir.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Though Vanilla Sky is smoothly and professionally done, even audiences who haven't seen the original will sense there is something off in the translation.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Resembles a fast-and-flashy variation on "The Sixth Sense," with touches of "The Matrix" as a bonus.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

For all the filmmakers' efforts, this project is something of an artistic albatross. It's a conundrum that doesn't get answered until a sort of help-the-audience Cliffs Notes final scene, in which we learn Everything. But by then, more than a few of us may be wondering, was it all really worth the trouble?

New Times (L.A.) Robert Wilonsky

Crowe renders David's dream (and its accompanying nightmare) so literal we can't help but leave the theater feeling as though we've been lectured to, told how to feel and what to think. And for an audience, that's a bit of a nightmare.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Crowe preserves the original film's plot twists and turns, but his version lumbers when it should be whipping along, daring you to keep up. The wall-to-wall pop music soundtrack eventually becomes oppressive, and Cruise's oily smile doesn't really constitute a characterization.

Film Threat Gareth Von Kallenbach

My suggestion is to avoid this film and instead rent Open Your Eyes (Abre Los Ojos) the film upon which Vanilla Sky was based.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

The title doesn't hint at the unsavory mess the film actually is.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

May not emerge as the biggest disaster of the holiday movie season, if only because we haven't yet seen all the other year-end films. But it is a huge high-energy misfire, bringing Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, and Cameron Crowe to earth with a thud.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

If Crowe's eyes are open, he seems to have directed most of Vanilla Sky with his mind wide shut.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Probably the most garishly masochistic star turn since Mel Gibson's "The Man Without a Face." It could also be the most baroque chick flick ever made, the freakazoid spawn of "An Affair to Remember" and "The Matrix."

Slate David Edelstein

It's no wonder that Crowe can't generate any real feeling. The narrative is alien to him on every level. The ear-grating dialogue is a good indication that he didn't know what he was doing; he's usually pitch-perfect.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Its tone is unquenchably pretentious, and its scale is overblown.

Time Richard Corliss

Every ambitious picturemaker should be allowed one wild misfire at no lasting cost to his reputation. Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) can now put this aside and go back to making good films.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Overblown and idiotic, this new "erotic thriller" is neither erotic nor thrilling; it's long, boring and self-indulgent.