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100A dazzling experiment that paid off immensely, this is cinematic pleasure at its purest. One caveat: If they ever make a sequel, we're taking two stars back.
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91It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand.
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90We've never sat through anything with Cloverfield's subjective sting. You'd have to be tougher than I was not to be blown sideways by it.
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Cloverfield never stops to identify the why, whence, or whereto of its rampaging meanie-this relentless thriller stops for nothing-but as for what to call it, behold . . . al-Qaedzilla!
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89Cloverfield is the most intense and original creature feature I've seen in my adult moviegoing life, and that's coming from a guy who knows his Gojira from his Gamera and his Harryhausen from his Honda. Cloverfield isn't a horror film – it's a pure-blood, grade A, exultantly exhilarating monster movie.
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83Cloverfield, a surreptitiously subversive, stylistically clever little gem of an entertainment disguised, under its deadpan-neutral title, as a dumb Gen-YouTube monster movie, makes the convincingly chilling argument that the world will end -- or, at least, Manhattan will crumble -- with a bang and a whimper.
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83It's a sharp and vivid film, filled with moments of tremendous ingenuity and characterized by a persistent avoidance of the expected tropes. It's far scarier than the big-budget remakes of "Godzilla" and "King Kong," more engaging than "I Am Legend," more human than a sackful of slasher films.
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75Mercifully, at 84 minutes the movie is even shorter than its originally alleged 90-minute running time; how much visual shakiness can we take? And yet, all in all, it is an effective film, deploying its special effects well and never breaking the illusion that it is all happening as we see it.
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75It's dumb but quick and dirty and effectively brusque, dispensing with niceties such as character.
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75There are a few surprises lurking in Cloverfield, and director Matt Reeves has an uncanny ability to time his jolts and scare when you least expect it.
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75Manhattan has always been a fat target for apocalypse filmmakers, but with its 9/11-inspired imagery, Matt Reeves' breathlessly fast-paced Cloverfield is going to resonate with New York audiences in a way no other horror film has.
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75Produced by "Lost" and "Alias" mastermind J.J. Abrams, Cloverfield has been one of the more interesting experiments in large-scale guerrilla filmmaking.
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75The genre may be old news, but the skillfully made Cloverfield offers a heart-racing experience with plenty of chills, thrills and exhilaration.
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75Cloverfield is content to be a creature feature; that's what makes it bearable and what keeps it from greatness. The genre, not the script, does the psychological heavy lifting.
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75Cloverfield's gritty, in-your-face style is uncompromising. If you're looking for a nice, clean movie filmed with a steadycam, you'll have to look elsewhere.
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75It's not the life-changing movie experience the intense viral marketing attention would lead you to think it is, but its decision to focus on ground-level humanism rather than epic disaster is what separates it from the pack.
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75Cloverfield is an exercise in realism that lacks reality's broader and richer context. Or, put another way, the experiment is artful, but it ain't art.
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When the monster shows up, pretty early in the film, everything becomes much more interesting, as it smashes buildings in midtown Manhattan like some sort of Rudy Giuliani, 9/11 nightmare.
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75It's been a while since we've had a good monster movie, and while Cloverfield probably won't give you sleepless nights, it will certainly keep you awake in the theater.
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70Think "Godzilla Unplugged" -- with chillingly effective results.
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70It's a thoroughly intense and mostly entertaining movie.
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70Cloverfield is a vastly old-fashioned piece of work, creaking with hilarious contrivance. I was thrilled, for instance, to hear someone actually speak the line "It's alive!"
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70The narrative conceit requires a fair amount of indulgence as the story progresses, but the fleeting, incomplete glimpses of the monster early on prove the old dictum of B movie auteur Val Lewton that a momentary image can have greater impact than a prolonged one.
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67Long on style and technique, short on substance and plot.
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63Now that the fanboy hype has cleared, we can see Cloverfield for what it is: borrowed inspiration, trite screenwriting and amateurish acting all in the service of a ballsy idea -- that a horror movie could maybe, just maybe, have a soul.
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63Much scampering, yelling, quaking and crying is required of the actors, and they acquit themselves well enough, even with oozing fake wounds and prop rebars piercing their shoulder blades.
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60Despite a first reel entirely devoted to establishing characters, Cloverfield is basically a line-'em-up, pick-'em-off horror movie that's effective without being either viscerally frightening or emotionally moving. Watching it is like going through a car wash: You come out of it thoroughly Cloverfield-ized, but essentially unchanged.
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50Combines unpleasantness and stupidity to a degree that would be difficult to match unless you were stuck in bed with a case of the shingles while being forced to watch "The Ghost Whisperer."
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50An efficient but shallow fright show.
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50While the entertainment value of Cloverfield is highly negotiable, it's clear that Abrams has consciously aligned himself with those filmmakers who have used the template of a grade-B monster/invasion movie -- Don Siegel, George Romero, Steven Spielberg -- as a stealth vessel for social commentary.
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50Adept at wringing maximum suspense and might have reached the heights of the Korean monster film "The Host" but for the limitations of the camcorder ploy. While it injects the film with a run-and-gun urgency, the device grows tiresome and ultimately leaves the film shortchanged.
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50Mind you, I don't begrudge the creators of even a junk-food movie like Cloverfield the fun they had demolishing New York one more time.
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50Despite its indie-flavored shooting style, first-rate visual effects, reasonable intensity factor, nihilistic attitude and post-9/11 anxiety overlay, this punchy sci-fier is, in the end, not much different from all the marauding creature features that have come before it.
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38No movie this year will better embody Macbeth's description of life itself: "a tale ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
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30It pretends to examine how self-absorbed we are as a culture, only to be consumed by its own self-absorption. It's also badly constructed, humorless and emotionally sadistic .
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30Like too many big-studio productions, Cloverfield works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt. Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.
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Cloverfield is a relentless, I-thought-my-eyeballs-were-bleeding exercise in visual disorientation.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 252 out of 440
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Mixed: 31 out of 440
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Negative: 157 out of 440
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