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75Norman Bates is alive and well, and just a tad kinkier than you remember him.
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75William H. Macy is fine as the detective Arbogast, wearing a hat he could have borrowed from Martin Balsam in the original role.
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75The film is shot in color and includes an amped-up Danny Elfman version of Bernard Herrmann's haunting score.
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70May not be anything new, but it's still just as shocking.
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Funny and sort of creepy--a not bad little thriller with some peculiarly dated plot development.
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70It remains the most structurally elegant and sneakily playful of thrillers. At least some things never change.
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Cold, dull, lifeless. [5 December 1998, p.3]
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63Untantalizingly reverent remake. [7 December 1998, p.4D]
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60A faithful-unto-slavish remake of the 1960 Hitchcock classic, pic contains nothing to outrage or offend partisans of the original, yet neither does it stand to add much to their appreciation.
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If the original did not exist, would this picture be worth seeing?
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50It's so slavishly similar to its predecessor - right down to the symbolic lettering on Marion's license plates - that there's little to spark fresh discussion except the acting.
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50In the shock department, the ante has been upped, way up, and a mere kitchen knife through a shower curtain just doesn't cut it any more.
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50Van Sant's film feels as dated as Hitchcock's, and Hitchcock's has the better excuse.
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50The movie doesn't stink. The performances are good, potentially great, especially Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates.
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50As Norman Bates, Vince Vaughn makes us better appreciate how much Anthony Perkins brought to the original project. It's clear now that he owned the role and that he shares equally with Hitchcock the credit for making Psycho the memorable creep show it is -- and was.
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50This Psycho seems a little nuts.
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40The thrill of the original is seeing a black-and-white, one-foot-on-the-floor, no-sex-please Hays Code world suddenly explode into a slasher movie. Our loss of innocence has, simply, changed all the rules.
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40Hitchcock's Psycho had a lot more than watchability going for it. Van Sant's film impresses only on the level of a cinematic parlor trick, and while that makes it an interesting curiosity, the world doesn't need it.
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40The response for anyone familiar with the original Psycho is likely to be restricted to a narrow range between briefly enjoyable déjà vu and mild disappointment. The movie lacks the chutzpah to even be a travesty.
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38The movie is an invaluable experiment in the theory of cinema, because it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted.
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38Redundant and unnecessary.
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30Anne Heche is just another neo-noir minx on the make, while Vince Vaughn, grinning and leering as Norman Bates, sinks the movie.
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0Van Sant's doomed and misguided experiment.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 1 out of 4
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Mixed: 1 out of 4
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Negative: 2 out of 4
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Frankly, this experimented shot-for-shot remake is just an insult to the timeless, classic 1960 original version of "Psycho".