21 Grams
Metascore
70 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 41 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 31 out of 41
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 41
  3. Negative: 5 out of 41
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  1. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    100
    At the very least, look for it on 10-best lists next month, and there's every chance it will be a strong contender at the Oscars. Filmmaking so sensitive and intelligent deserves its weight in honors.
  2. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Steven Rea
    100
    This sad, staggering drama should be seen: out of the grimness, and the profound calamity, you can almost taste life in your mouth.
  3. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    100
    Unstintingly explores and exposes excruciating pain, raw grief, ruinous vengeance and life-affirming resilience, creating human portraits that are uncommonly exhilarating in their honesty. This is cinematic art in its highest form.
  4. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    100
    A stunning kaleidoscope of a motion picture - a mosaic of images that gradually resolves itself into a powerful tale of tragedy and redemption.
  5. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jack Mathews
    100
    As darkness falls over the movie landscape comes the year's darkest and best movie of them all - Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams.
  6. Empire
    Reviewed by: Rob Fraser
    100
    21 Grams strives for greatness, and that's precisely what it achieves.
  7. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    100
    You won't come out unaffected, because the depths of intimacy that the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu plumbs here are so rarely touched by filmmakers that 21 Grams is tantamount to the discovery of a new country.
  8. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Kirk Honeycutt
    90
    A stunning virtuoso performance by director, cast and crew. This movie knocks you out with an astonishing blend of hyper-realism, visual complexity and powerful themes.
  9. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: D.W. Smith
    90
    Trust me, if you have a thirst for a good, dark drama, this one is a big gulp.
  10. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    90
    What gives the film a formalist kick is that the story unfolds piecemeal as a series of nonlinear moments. What gives it soul are the three lead actors who pull the pieces together with devastating power.
  11. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    90
    Mr. Penn has been praised lavishly for his work in "Mystic River," in a role that was no reach for him at all, but this is one of the stand-out performances of his career, layered and exquisitely nuanced. And, remarkably, he's only one-third of a stellar ensemble.
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  12. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Stephen Hunter
    90
    The movie itself is a miracle: tough, smart, relentless, provocative and, above all, serious.
  13. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    88
    You won't see more explosive acting this year.
  14. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Wilmington
    88
    Blessed with one of the strongest casts of any American movie this year, this bravura film, with its radical structure, is full of risk and reward.
  15. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Lou Lumenick
    88
    Stunningly photographed, largely with a hand-held camera, by Rodrigo Prieto (another member of the "Amores Perros" team) on gritty locations in Memphis and Albuquerque, 21 Grams is also a visual tour de force - and a rare Hollywood product depicting class differences with any kind of honesty.
  16. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    88
    One of the most original, and certainly among the best-acted films this year, 21 Grams focuses on people on the verge of dying, having survived death or grasping at the slender threads of new lives.
  17. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    83
    Paradoxically, a movie that loses power the more you perceive what's actually going on in it. Laid end to end, the story is, to put it mildly, overwrought, fusing several cataclysms too many.
  18. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Sean Axmaker
    83
    A punch in the stomach of a movie. It is as ugly as it is beautiful, as full of peaks as of lows. It's a character-driven movie about people on an emotional edge who are ridding themselves of the things that can no longer work without inflicting damage.
  19. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Rick Kisonak
    80
    Each and every one of the movie's 125 minutes is a moment of searing truth.
  20. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Nathan Rabin
    80
    A nearly unparalleled actor's showcase, the film boasts performances of impressive quality and quantity...Their complexity matches the film's.
  21. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Kimberley Jones
    78
    A devastating and weighty picture.
  22. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    75
    21 Grams tells such a tormenting story that it just about survives its style. It would have been more powerful in chronological order, and even as a puzzle, it has a deep effect.
  23. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Carla Meyer
    75
    The payoff in 21 Grams comes not from watching characters achieve or overcome but from the recognition of their struggle not to give up the fight.
  24. Charlotte Observer
    Reviewed by: Lawrence Toppman
    75
    Despite juggled storytelling, the movie's compelling.
  25. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    70
    Aside from a little eleventh-hour pseudo-mysticism about death and the weight of the soul, the story is really little more than a unusually gripping thriller.
  26. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Andrew O'Hehir
    70
    Uprooted from their home soil, González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga can't quite manage to make this gloomy, improbable stew of romance, film noir and pseudo-metaphysical speculation hang together.
  27. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: J. Hoberman
    70
    Watts, who has the most difficult scenes, is splendidly mercurial; what's surprising is that those professional storm clouds Penn and Del Toro are here as powerfully restrained as she is electrifying.
  28. Dallas Observer
    Reviewed by: Robert Wilonsky
    70
    Aimed at the brain, when it should have been one for the heart.
  29. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: J.R. Jones
    70
    As in "Amores perros," Iñarritu and Arriaga slice and dice the chronology, which helps distract from the warmed-over story elements and focus attention on the superior performances.
  30. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    67
    While a splendidly acted and worthily grown-up movie, too often has the feel of a potboiling soap opera, with twists and turns that range from the grimly ironic to the absurdly sensational.
  31. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Rene Rodriguez
    63
    The fragmented style is distracting and ultimately annoying, robbing the story of its suspense and drive while contributing nothing except self-conscious style.
  32. Newsweek
    Reviewed by: David Ansen
    60
    What keeps this movie honest is the characters, each of them a mass of conflicting instincts, virtues and vices. You know Gonzalez Inarritu comes from outside Hollywood because he doesn't divide the world into heroes and villains.
  33. Variety
    Reviewed by: David Rooney
    60
    Ambitiously structured in non-chronological fragments that form a fascinating puzzle, this raw drama about grief, guilt and redemption becomes ultimately overextended and overwrought in its final stretch.
  34. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    50
    Long on mood and moodiness, but at a loss as how to break any interesting human ground.
  35. Premiere
    Reviewed by: Glenn Kenny
    50
    Too-laborious meditation on life and death.
  36. Baltimore Sun
    Reviewed by: Michael Sragow
    50
    Luckily, Penn, Watts and Leo carry more weight than that; they keep this movie's two hours and five minutes from seeming like lost time.
  37. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    30
    It’s forceful, to be sure, but in a lurid way that suggests a telenovela that’s been baking in the sun too long.
  38. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Scott Foundas
    30
    Where "Amores Perros" was a feast of energy, wit and imagination, 21 Grams is like a starvation diet -- a movie that wallows so profoundly in its own misery that watching it is like atoning for some sin you didn't commit.
  39. Slate
    Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    30
    As usual with Penn, I don't completely buy the character, but I completely buy that he has brilliantly internalized SOMETHING. He goes to some weird psychological places, our Sean.
  40. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Desson Thomson
    30
    It's so laden with foreboding, you want to get out from under it and gasp for air.
  41. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: David Denby
    30
    The kind of bad movie that makes a reviewer feel terrible. It has been put together with great sincerity, and yet, impassioned and affecting as some of it is, 21 Grams is also an arrogant failure. [24 November 2003, p. 113]
    All this critic's reviews

User Reviews

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User Score
8.0 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 138 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 48 out of 59
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 59
  3. Negative: 9 out of 59
  1. ryancarroll88
    7
    Between "Amores Perros," "Babel" and this movie, Gonzalez Inarritu has produced some of the heaviest dramas of the past 10 years. Perhaps it is because they all deal with such shattered characters - in this case we are given a man who has just undergone heart replacement surgery which temporarily alleviates the strain ...between him and his separated wife, a born-again man who suddenly finds himself responsible for running over and killing a husband and two girls and the woman who has lost her whole family in that car accident. Each of these characters are faced with the idea of moving on with their lives; as we watch them adjust, we see that the difficulty isn't overcoming the past - it's the realization that they don't even understand what their lives are anymore. The serious performances from the three leads (Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts) are really what give the film its depth, and even make up for Inarritu's completely unnecessary nonlinear style, which seems to serve no purpose other than to make the viewer pay more attention.… Full Review »
  2. caporegime
    3
    So trying hard to make things complicated and ending up making this film boring enough to doze of my adrenalin of caffeine.
  3. IsaacC.
    6
    Arguably the best film of 2004. Benicio Del Toro as usual acts the socks of everyone else around him. Although the story is far too conveniently artistic to ever be considered as anything resembling any kind of reality it grips you and shakes violently from start to finish. My one grievance with this film is that although the rewards for those who are patient enough to accept the initially incomprehensible first half hour on good faith are great, on second and third viewing the film becomes slow, the tension is gone and the story becomes trite. As someone who continuously re-watches my favourite films with little or no loss of enjoyment I am left with one question: Is a film worth watching if you can only see it once?… Full Review »
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