- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100This film is such a virtuoso high-wire act, daring so much, achieving it with such grace and skill. Minority Report reminds us why we go to the movies in the first place.
-
100A heart-pounding experience that makes you think and contains a gallery of characters that will haunt your nightmares for years to come.
-
100This is the kind of pure entertainment that, in its fullness and generosity, feels almost classic.
-
100Stripped of all bravado, Cruise delivers a raw and probably detractor-proof performance. Spielberg does what he did right in creating a novel milieu for "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," but this time the writing is fresher and anything but unwieldy.
-
100It affirms that, even in the 2000s, movies do not have to be brain-dead to be exciting. When the season is over, Minority Report will more than likely stand out as the best picture to grace multiplex screens during the Summer of 2002.
-
100May show both director and star working at their professional peaks, but I don't think it's as good as that underappreciated masterwork "A.I." It's not as resonant and daring, not as full of magic and marvel. Spielberg stretches himself technically here but not emotionally.
-
91A happy surprise: a timely antidote to the comic-book mindlessness of "Spider-Man" and repetitive space fantasy of "Star Wars," and an encouraging bid from the top of the A-list to once again reach very high and spit in the face of the gutless formula filmmaking that rules Hollywood.
-
90Where Minority Report succeeds is by dishing up a little bit of everything – to see no one leaves the theater disgruntled. There are helpings of science fiction marvel, there’s some interminable tension and a real human story underneath it all. The specials effects are damn impressive to boot.
-
90It's a dark and dazzling spectacle.
-
90Terrifically entertaining specimen of Spielbergian sci-fi, incomparably better than "A.I." and as dark a movie as the director has made since "Schindler's List."
-
90Few directors are capable of marrying ideas and entertainment—one is often sacrificed for the other—but Spielberg peppers one gripping action setpiece after another with trenchant details about a near-future robbed of the most basic freedoms and privacy.
-
90Ferociously intense, furiously kinetic, it’s expressionist film noir science fiction that, like all good sci-fi, peers into the future to shed light on the present.
-
90Spielberg's sharpest, brawniest, most bustling entertainment since "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the finest of the season's action epics.
-
90The casting of Minority Report may be the smartest in the history of Spielberg. [1 July 2002, p. 96]
-
88This is a fiendishly complicated whodunit -- or, to be more precise, a who-done-what-to-whom-and-when -- told within the confines of thoughtful, speculative science-fiction.
-
88The film moves swiftly and unerringly to its conclusion. Spielberg remains under Stanley Kubrick's directorial spell.
-
83The most compelling question dangling at its end is, "Didn't Steven Spielberg used to know how to bring a movie to an end?"
-
80May be a shade too serious and contemplative to completely enchant the thrill-seeking masses, while simultaneously seeming too mainstream-minded and genre-bound to be entirely embraced by highbrows.
-
80Spielberg takes assured control. In his hands, Minority Report is a classy, chilly quasi-Hitchcockian affair.
-
80Spielberg's dark side may not be where everyone wants to live, but it's somehow encouraging to know that he has one.
-
80The first 20 minutes are masterful, as Cruise hunts down a killer-to-be; the last 20 are mediocre, as screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen untangle the mystery they've grafted onto Dick's story. In between lies a conventional but expertly realized cop-on-the-run drama.
-
78It's not the crowning achievement in Steven Spielberg's oeuvre, but Minority Report stands on its own sturdy sci-fi legs, and there's no sign of that little imp Haley Joel Osment, to boot, thankfully.
-
75Its most vivid scenes -- a visit with an insane ophthalmologist, a showdown at Anderton's supposed crime scene -- have the kind of anything-goes creativity that set "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" apart from the crowd last year.
-
75Taut entertainment that juggles brainy ideas about perception, predetermination and free will - and drops things in a messy third act where the vintage noir gets bathed in a bit too much Spielbergian glow.
-
75Cruise will never be a master thespian, but there's no one better at putting across the charisma of control, and the opening sequence of ''Report'' is an astonishingly fluid demonstration of his gifts.
-
75The mechanical beauty and android possibilities of the future excite the filmmaker, and that's where Minority Report becomes an alluring postcard from the edge. But it's an edge over which Spielberg never seems to want to step.
-
70One of the glummest and most forbidding thrillers ever.
-
70It's not the kind of work that wins awards, but without Cruise's intensity almost willing our interest in Spielberg's unrelentingly dark world, Minority Report wouldn't have nearly as much life as it does.
-
70Though he can still deliver an amazing scare, Mr. Spielberg's interest now leans more toward exposition rather than the anticipatory. He is explaining the fun away.
-
70Whose idea was it to turn Minority Report into a mushy declaration of humanism? It ends up as less of a warning about an Orwellian police state than a protest that Pre-Cogs are people, too. It's Dick-less.
-
70Can barely move during its final half hour, which is a shame, because until then it's a frenetic, engaging ride -- a huge grin, not unlike the one Tom Cruise now hides behind his grownup's braces.
-
63By turns silly and amazing, a mishmash of Kubrickian devices accompanied by a steady Spielbergian drip of sentimentality.
-
63More humdrum than horrible. It isn't futuristic film noir; it's just everyday film beige.
-
63We'll never know what might have been, as eye candy and food for thought replace real thrills in the cool but cold Minority Report.
-
60Miscast, misguided, and often nonsensical, Minority Report is nevertheless the most entertaining, least pretentious genre movie Steven Spielberg has made in the decade since "Jurassic Park."
-
60Though his movie wraps challenging ideas and ingenious visual conceits in a futurist film-noir style, it's pretentious, didactic and intentionally but mercilessly bleak in ways that classic noir never was.
-
40Give Steven Spielberg some dinosaurs or a cute, funny alien and he'll spin populist sci-fi till the Arcturan cows come home. Give him a philosophical story about technology changing what it means to live in this world and he'll craft a hodgepodge of shallow and unexplored ideas.