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83A mostly fascinating, often frustrating, boldly uncommercial Hollywood version of a boldly uncommercial art film. It's very atypical of the previous work of both director and star, and it's as personal a film, I suspect, as Cruise will ever make.
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80Highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory.
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78It's a film that you can take home and chew over later, both abrasive in its loudness and reflective in its fleeting, feminine moments of silence. Well done.
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75This is the kind of movie you don't want to analyze until you've seen it two times. Now that I've seen it twice, I think I understand it, or maybe not. Certainly it's entertaining as it rolls along.
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75An involving, sweetly touching love story, buoyed by Crowe's natural, poetic dialogue and his knack for writing characters (especially women) who feel like real people instead of plot devices.
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70Crowe's tantalizing film sticks with you.
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70The picture has vitality, a fine cast and excellent craft
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63Crowe's chilliest movie. In part this is by design. Like "Open Your Eyes," to which Crowe is mostly faithful, Vanilla Sky is a head trip that merges thriller, romance and science-fiction elements while playing with our notions of dreams and reality.
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63Has moments that are eerily beautiful and genuinely moving -- and some that are surprisingly vulgar.
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63Visually dazzling but ultimately dizzying ride, a trippy suspenser that gets tripped up on its own deja vu voodoo.
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63What works in a quirky foreign film can look silly with expansive Hollywood treatment. Crowe is smart enough to know this, so it's baffling he chose Vanilla over richer cinematic tastes.
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63I admire Cameron Crowe for daring to write and direct a movie as strange as Vanilla Sky. I lament the casting of Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz in the leads.
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60It reeks of unearned profundity, but I found it entertaining.
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58Lost in this beguiling labyrinth, Vanilla Sky is more fascinating as a bit of evidence than as a movie -- and ultimately less pleasing than most audiences will want.
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50Resembles a fast-and-flashy variation on "The Sixth Sense," with touches of "The Matrix" as a bonus.
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50The film's aim -- to dazzle and inspire -- is sapped by Cruise's vein-popping, running-the-marathon performance.
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50Like an over-packed three-scoop cone -- it melts into a mess while we're still slurping away.
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50Crowe, for his part, is decency itself, but unlike Amenábar he's a pop romantic with no stomach or aptitude for noir.
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50For better or worse, Vanilla Sky is a genuine, albeit jejune, statement of star consciousness -- blustery with self-awe and feverish with cataclysmic self-doubt.
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50Though Vanilla Sky is smoothly and professionally done, even audiences who haven't seen the original will sense there is something off in the translation.
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40Crowe preserves the original film's plot twists and turns, but his version lumbers when it should be whipping along, daring you to keep up. The wall-to-wall pop music soundtrack eventually becomes oppressive, and Cruise's oily smile doesn't really constitute a characterization.
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40My suggestion is to avoid this film and instead rent Open Your Eyes (Abre Los Ojos) the film upon which Vanilla Sky was based.
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40For all the filmmakers' efforts, this project is something of an artistic albatross. It's a conundrum that doesn't get answered until a sort of help-the-audience Cliffs Notes final scene, in which we learn Everything. But by then, more than a few of us may be wondering, was it all really worth the trouble?
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40Crowe renders David's dream (and its accompanying nightmare) so literal we can't help but leave the theater feeling as though we've been lectured to, told how to feel and what to think. And for an audience, that's a bit of a nightmare.
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38The title doesn't hint at the unsavory mess the film actually is.
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38May not emerge as the biggest disaster of the holiday movie season, if only because we haven't yet seen all the other year-end films. But it is a huge high-energy misfire, bringing Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, and Cameron Crowe to earth with a thud.
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33If Crowe's eyes are open, he seems to have directed most of Vanilla Sky with his mind wide shut.
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30Probably the most garishly masochistic star turn since Mel Gibson's "The Man Without a Face." It could also be the most baroque chick flick ever made, the freakazoid spawn of "An Affair to Remember" and "The Matrix."
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30It's no wonder that Crowe can't generate any real feeling. The narrative is alien to him on every level. The ear-grating dialogue is a good indication that he didn't know what he was doing; he's usually pitch-perfect.
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30Its tone is unquenchably pretentious, and its scale is overblown.
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20Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right.
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20Every ambitious picturemaker should be allowed one wild misfire at no lasting cost to his reputation. Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) can now put this aside and go back to making good films.
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10Overblown and idiotic, this new "erotic thriller" is neither erotic nor thrilling; it's long, boring and self-indulgent.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 71 out of 94
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Mixed: 5 out of 94
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Negative: 18 out of 94
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