- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
80Some genuine shocks punctuate The Exorcism of Emily Rose, an unusually intelligent genre item that manages to mix full-bore horror with courtroom drama.
-
80With a cast like this, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a superior performance vehicle and on that count alone is never less than riveting.
-
75Somehow the movie really never takes off into the riveting fascination we expect in the opening scenes. Maybe it cannot; maybe it is too faithful to the issues it raises to exploit them.
-
75Emily Rose is the thinking person's demon possession movie, which presents a chilling case history that's hard to explain away.
-
75Plays like a modern-day inversion of "Inherit the Wind," highlighting an astonishing shift in the American legal system over the last 80 years.
-
75Fans expecting horror won't want a thought-provoking, well-acted courtroom drama about the intersection of religious belief and the law.
-
67Part "Law & Order," part "The Omen," the movie doesn't trust the audience to follow serious theological and legal discussion without a spook hook.
-
63Fashioning a hybrid of a courtroom drama and a horror film that is suspenseful and scary requires a clear vision and directorial finesse. Rose lacks both. But the performances are topnotch.
-
63Take away the performances, and all that would be left is a cheapish B-grade motion picture.
-
60Could have been both a gripping courtroom drama and a chilling "is she or isn't she?" horror tale. What we have instead is a movie that drifts, almost unmanned, from plot point to plot point.
-
60Ror all its cleverness, Emily Rose does have its hokey moments.
-
58It's a pretense of even-handedness. The true story has been reduced to a case for faith. It merely sacrifices all reason to get there.
-
Derrickson's characters are reduced to ciphers in a theological debate. Long wedges of the film are simply a discussion about the relative merits of science and superstition. Carpenter, as the sick girl, puts in the best performance.
-
It's hard to get riled up one way or the other by a film about an exorcist who is forced, cruelly and relentlessly, to introduce one flashback after another.
-
50Allegedly it's based on a true story, which is believable only because the outcome is so unsatisfying it carries the dull metallic tang of real-life ambiguity. And that's neither scary nor stimulating.
-
50This windy courtroom drama is punctuated by cheesy flashbacks.
-
Positively hops with jolts and frights but they're the cheap kind.
-
50Part courtroom drama, part otherworldly shocker, the film basically restages the Scopes Monkey Trial and comes out once more against Mr. Darrow, and it's got the spine-twisting, tongues-speaking, devil-channeling hellion to prove it.
-
50Muddled tale of faith and reason.
-
50While not especially good - judged strictly on its cinematic merits, it ranges from O.K. to god-awful - it is still a fascinating cultural document in the age of intelligent design.
-
50The script is a lifeless succession of attorney-client debates and stormy horror flashbacks, though I had a good time watching Jennifer Carpenter, a comic Buffy type in "White Chicks" and "D.E.B.S.," hurl herself around as the title character.
-
42I'm all for hearty theological debate. But this is intellectual suicide. Even worse, it's boring intellectual suicide.
-
40Simultaneously sober and silly horror picture.
-
40Creepy enough at first, this relatively gore-free film gradually becomes a stifling talk-fest in which superb actors drone on for so long about the nature of belief that one longs for a juror to spew a little pea soup.
-
40Derrickson's flick can sour your stomach with piety, which is a shame -- its moments of jolt wattage rate with many J-horrors.
-
38The dullest exorcist movie ever made.
-
38Unfortunately, nothing in it rings with the faintest tinkle of truth.
-
30Derrickson's staid direction, coupled with Wilkinson's sad-sack priest and a general air of dreariness make for a courtroom thriller that's somewhat less apocalyptic than the "L.A. Law" episode involving the death of Benny's mom.
-
30It has but one thing going for it: a cast filled with Oscar nominees.
-
30The acting in this movie is unusually bad--atrocious, even.
-
25Oh, how good actors can trap themselves in drivel.
-
25The fun of these movies is that Linney often seems too refined for such greasy junk, but there she is anyway, hamming it down as it were.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 34 out of 47
-
Mixed: 5 out of 47
-
Negative: 8 out of 47
-
DonP.8
-
8