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Bee Season
Metascore
54 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 32 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 13 out of 32
  2. Mixed: 16 out of 32
  3. Negative: 3 out of 32
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  1. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    100
    The performance by Flora Cross is haunting in its seriousness. She doesn't act out; she acts in.
  2. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    83
    Sometimes a movie can defy rational logic, yet still make sense emotionally in a way that pulls you through. Bee Season is one.
  3. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    80
    With the help of clear direction and some excellent acting, especially from Flora Cross in a memorable debut as Eliza, Bee Season is affecting in ways that movies have all but given up trying to be.
  4. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Carrie Rickey
    75
    Bee Season is lit by human sunbeam Flora Cross as Eliza.
  5. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    75
    One isn't quite ready to forgive the miscasting of Gere, however, who is about as convincing a Kabbalistic scholar as Madonna.
  6. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    75
    Based on the captivating novel by Myla Goldberg, Bee Season is evocative and superbly acted.
  7. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    75
    Bee Season, at its core, is about something powerful: The ways in which family members wreak destruction on each other with the best of intentions.
  8. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    70
    McGehee and Siegel's ornate structure and editing stay just this side of tricky, as does their borderline-goofy use of special effects to make us see the world (and the words) through Eliza's anxious eyes.
  9. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    70
    A serious film filled with both great and awkward ideas and made as much from the heart as the head.
  10. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    70
    For a film filled with jagged shards of glass, and sometimes shot kaleidoscopically, through the windows of houses or cars, Bee Season is carefully, almost relentlessly, intended. That said, the script, by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, touches on themes that rarely make it to the big screen.
    All this critic's reviews
  11. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Meredith Brody
    70
    The directors exercise their stylistic flourishes mainly in the imaginative sequences depicting the young daughter's trancelike state while she conjures up the correct orthography in the spelling bees her father's determined she must win, and while the film observes the same heartbreaking obsessiveness as the popular "Spellbound," it has none of that documentary's cuteness.
  12. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    67
    Bee Season answers the question no Talmudic student or fan of "Unfaithful" has thought to ask: What would Richard Gere look like as a learned Jewish scholar and teacher?
  13. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    63
    There's no shortage of material on the screen in Bee Season - it's just not assembled in a satisfying manner.
  14. Baltimore Sun
    Reviewed by: Chris Kaltenbach
    58
    The film ultimately is a letdown, leaving too many questions unanswered and ending in a gesture that doesn't really solve anything.
  15. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Kirk Honeycutt
    50
    Ultimately, its success may depend on how emotionally satisfying audiences find this flirtation with Jewish mysticism.
  16. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    50
    Fine directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel take a detour into mumbo jumbo.
  17. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Rene Rodriguez
    50
    A drama about dysfunction, spelling bees, mental illness, Hare Krishnas and kaballah. The movie is just as unwieldy as it sounds, except that it also stars Richard Gere.
  18. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Ruthe Stein
    50
    The attempt to be clever is transparent.
  19. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    50
    Here the foundation has been miscast. That's M-I-S-C-A-S-T.
  20. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Stephen Cole
    50
    Though bathed in ecclesiastical light and a work of obvious craft and ambition, Bee Season is grimly serious and rather full of itself.
  21. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Sean Axmaker
    50
    This well-meaning mistake gets lost in the metaphors.
  22. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Jessica Winter
    50
    The mysticism only mystifies; its hieroglyphics are vividly rendered, but Bee Season never manages to spell them out.
  23. Dallas Observer
    Reviewed by: Melissa Levine
    50
    This is inelegant storytelling, and it almost entirely cancels out what's good about the film: Max Minghella, for one thing. The son of director Anthony, he gives a very fresh performance, popping with energy that the other characters seem to drain.
  24. Variety
    Reviewed by: Todd McCarthy
    50
    The film is ice cold, never finding a way to invite the viewer into the story, and Richard Gere doesn't convince as a Jewish biblical scholar.
  25. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Desson Thomson
    50
    Co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, whose visual schemes lent a hypnotic aura to their previous collaborations -- "The Deep End" and "Suture" -- don't find the right balance of story and image this time.
  26. The New Republic
    Reviewed by: Stanley Kauffmann
    50
    All these mystical elements are so sententiously handled and bump into one another so clumsily that they make the film seem nutty. But because spirituality is the theme of Bee Season, we are obviously not meant to laugh at it. Well, I wish I could get Jehovah's reaction to the picture.
  27. Empire
    Reviewed by: Steve O'Hagan
    40
    Gloopy family drama meets Hollywood cod-spirituality in a movie that's defeated by its over-ambitious scope.
  28. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Kimberley Jones
    40
    Myla Goldberg's novel about spelling-bee fever, a family in chaos, and religious/mystic exploration arrives on the screen with all its faults intact, but few of its charms.
  29. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Noel Murray
    40
    Everyone in Bee Season is chasing spiritual peace and falling behind, and McGehee and Siegel catch them at their most worn-out and static.
  30. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Allison Benedikt
    38
    Gere and Binoche are both terribly miscast--one far too charismatic, the other far too dowdy, which is something for Juliette Binoche. And the spelling bees? Dull. Dreary.
  31. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jack Mathews
    38
    It took one novelist, one screenwriter and two directors - Scott McGehee and David Siegel - to cobble together this earnest nonsense, and if it weren't for 12-year-old novice Flora Cross, who plays its central character, all would be lost.
  32. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Kyle Smith
    38
    F-A-I-L-U-R-E.
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User Reviews

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User Score
5.1 out of 10

Mixed or average reviews- based on 16 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 8
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 8
  3. Negative: 3 out of 8
  1. CherylC.
    4
    Simply a pretentious mess. What a waste of the children's talents.
  2. ChadS.
    4
    [***SPOILERS***] What's missing from "Bee Season" is that one scene in which we feel the thrill of Eliza's accomplishment. It's just not there. We think that moment is going to occur when Eliza and Aaron(Max Minghella) interrupt their father's class; something akin to Ned Beatty telling his co-workers that Rudy is going to Notre Dame. But no, we cut to the father's office, the big news already sprung, so we're denied Saul's initial bout of incredulousness. In the novel by Myla Goldberg, to my recollection, Miriam's depression never compartmentalizes Eliza's spelling bee training, and spelling bee competitions(most of the time, the spellers never get to finish their words) into afterthought. When you hire a big star like Juliette Binoche(her wanderings are introduced too early), that's going to happen. Not to mention, Richard Gere(in the book, I imagined Saul Naumann as a cross between Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street and Larry David). "Bee Season" needs more spelling and less, way less withering looks and tears. What if "Searching for Bobby Fischer" spent an inordinate amount of time on Lawrence Fishburne's hobo activities? I loved the book. This adaptation is very, very disappointing.… Full Review »
  3. E.Phillips
    2
    What a bizzare movie! Talk about a dysfunctional family!! I wonder why Richard Gere would do such a movie.
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