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Big Fish
Metascore
58 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 42 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 24 out of 42
  2. Mixed: 15 out of 42
  3. Negative: 3 out of 42
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  1. Premiere
    Reviewed by: Glenn Kenny
    100
    Big Fish really is a big delight.
  2. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Clint Morris
    90
    A tale that's so enriching, so heartwarming, so funny, so touching and so breathtaking, you'll wonder why the king of wackiness didn't branch out sooner.
  3. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    88
    Director Tim Burton finally hooks the one that got away: a script that challenges and deepens his visionary talent.
  4. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Wilmington
    88
    A word of warning. Big Fish is so strange and so literary that audiences seeking conventional fare may get impatient with it. But it always takes effort to catch the big ones. This one is worth it.
  5. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Megan Lehmann
    88
    Even with Burton's imagination turning its trademark cartwheels, the film's big beating heart holds the whimsical offshoots steady.
  6. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Mike Clark
    88
    Has enough tasty bait to satisfy an array of moviegoers: Burton fans, Albert Finney fans, fans of tall tales well spun by experts and fans of movies that don't look like any other.
  7. Baltimore Sun
    Reviewed by: Michael Sragow
    88
    This picture boasts a story about a yarn-spinning Southern father (Albert Finney) and a sober-sided son (Billy Crudup) that gives it ballast and staying power beyond anything in previous, precious Burton fables like "Edward Scissorhands" or "Ed Wood."
  8. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Rick Kisonak
    80
    An achievement of this magnitude is a stunning and extremely pleasant surprise.
  9. Empire
    Reviewed by: Ian Freer
    80
    In anchoring the whimsy to something more heartfelt, Burton is greatly aided by Billy Crudup, who underplays potentially cringeworthy bedside scenes with his dying dad.
  10. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Nathan Rabin
    80
    Burton rebounds in a big way with Big Fish, a Daniel Wallace adaptation and visual feast that recaptures the fairy-tale simplicity and wrenching emotional power of "Edward Scissorhands."
  11. Newsweek
    Reviewed by: David Ansen
    80
    When it catches fire, this great-looking movie offers hilarious diversions.
  12. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Carrie Rickey
    75
    Burton's film is an American version of the Odyssey.
  13. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    75
    Big Fish is a clever, smart fantasy that targets the child inside every adult, without insulting the intelligence of either.
  14. Charlotte Observer
    Reviewed by: Lawrence Toppman
    75
    Like virtually all fish stories, it's discursive, funny, full of boasting, a suspect mix of truth and lies with an emphasis on the latter.
  15. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    75
    The movie is a gently overstuffed cinematic piñata, crammed with tall tales -- with giants and circuses and fairy-tale woods, plus a huge squirmy catfish, all served up with a literal matter-of-fact fancy that is very pleasing.
  16. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    75
    Too well-made and well-acted to be entirely cute -- but the result is fairly tepid in comparison to the overheated highlights of Burton's career.
  17. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    70
    Such astringent details as a banjo player plucking a few ominous notes from "Dueling Banjos" when Ed first lays eyes on the Norman Rockwellian beauty of Spectre ensure that the story's fundamental sweetness never becomes cloying.
  18. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    70
    There's delight to be had from watching Burton conjure up one fantastical Edward-inspired scenario after another.
  19. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: William Arnold
    67
    An engagingly whimsical, sporadically charming, frequently very funny Southern Gothic fantasy that somehow doesn't quite come together to be as magical or meaningful as it's intended to be.
  20. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    63
    Big Fish of course is a great-looking film, with a fantastical visual style that could be called Felliniesque if Burton had not by now earned the right to the adjective Burtonesque.
  21. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Rene Rodriguez
    63
    This is a theme tailor-made for Burton, although there are times in the movie when it feels like he's not taking enough advantage of it.
  22. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jack Mathews
    63
    But Burton and August have added ­anger to the mix, and it sours much of the otherwise wondrous tone.
  23. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    63
    The actor's job here is the hardest to pull off, since practical skepticism in a Tim Burton picture is next to villainy. Yet Crudup suggests complex grown-up feelings that makes the rest of Big Fish feel like an earnest collection of magic tricks.
  24. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    63
    The problem is, there's just not enough Burton in Big Fish.
  25. Dallas Observer
    Reviewed by: Robert Wilonsky
    60
    For the first time, Burton seems comfortable walking around the real world.
  26. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    60
    Simultaneously beguiling and frustrating -- the product of an imagist and dramatist uncomfortably conjoined.
    All this critic's reviews
  27. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: Anthony Lane
    60
    What is most disappointing about Big Fish is the nervousness of its fantasizing--a strange unwillingness, new in Burton's work, to trust the wit of the audience. [15 December 2003, p. 119]
    All this critic's reviews
  28. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    50
    What a waste of a fine cast.
  29. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Stephanie Zacharek
    50
    It's nicely made, well shot, and reasonably well acted, yet it's enough to filet the life force right out of you. We need stories in order to dream, and to live. But that doesn't mean we have to buy every crappy one that comes down the pike.
  30. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    50
    Has moments of genuine emotion...but overall, the film feels like it issues from a place Burton doesn't inhabit.
  31. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
    50
    The most curious thing about this magical-realist fable...is how thin and soft it is, how unpersuasive and ultimately forgettable even its most strenuous inventions turn out to be.
  32. Variety
    Reviewed by: Todd McCarthy
    50
    The imaginatively illustrated but precariously precious film offers up a string of minor pleasures but never becomes more than moderately amusing or involving.
  33. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Rosenbaum
    50
    The Alabama setting is as phony as the one in Forrest Gump, and for all of Finney's effectiveness as a yarn-spinning geezer, his whoppers seem disconnected from his character and each other--a weakness Burton fails to resolve with an awkward Felliniesque finale.
  34. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Kirk Honeycutt
    40
    A misfire. The film that wants to be lighter than air instead crashes to earth with the swiftness of a concrete parachute.
  35. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    40
    Tim Burton is all grown up and getting serious with this wildly scattershot tale.
  36. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    40
    The whole seems disjointed, incoherent and lacking in the startling originality of the other two Edwards (Scissorhands and Wood) who, half a career back, poured from Burton's distended outsider imagination.
  37. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: J. Hoberman
    40
    An abundance of dull exposition building up to the son's attempt to cap his father's whoppers climaxes with a tedious flurry of Fellini-esque endings and Spielbergian fillips. The magic doesn't work twice -- or even once.
  38. Slate
    Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    40
    The most fluid, lyrical, and even-toned work of his (Burton's) career. It's also the most boring by a factor of 10.
  39. Time
    Reviewed by: Richard Corliss
    40
    The film fairly groans from all the narrative gamesmanship and lavish romantic gestures...The unbewitched viewer may groan as well.
  40. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Stephen Hunter
    30
    Big Fish stinks from the head.
  41. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Desson Thomson
    30
    A disappointingly dull thud of a fantasy.
  42. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Mick LaSalle
    25
    A long-winded indulgence in tear-and-a-smile whimsy, elevated above the merely irritating and saccharine by compelling art direction.
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User Reviews

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User Score
8.2 out of 10

Universal acclaim- based on 171 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 95 out of 109
  2. Mixed: 4 out of 109
  3. Negative: 10 out of 109
  1. AlonsoC.
    10
    A You-Must-See Movie, one of my favorite movies of all time, it has a funny part and has it serious and lovely part, you always learn something about life in this movie. And as Sam F. Says, this is one of those movie where you can say that if don't liked it, it's because you didn't get it. One of the greatest movies of all time (in MY opinion).… Full Review »
  2. erixs
    10
    Very touching...!! My girlfriend cried after seeing this movie, TWICE !!!
  3. samf
    9
    This is one of those movies where I can say that if you don't like it, it's because you don't get it.
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