| 91 |
Entertainment Weekly
It's not every day you get to see a movie that begins in satire and ends in reverence, but then, for Kevin Smith, they may ultimately be the same thing.
|
| 90 |
Rolling Stone
The first commandment of Dogma: Thou shalt not stop laughing.
|
| 90 |
Mr. Showbiz
Richard T. Jameson
One of those special movies whose freshness and vitality are so bounteously infectious, your humble reviewer wishes everyone had the pleasure of discovering it brand-new and undescribed.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
If the film is less than perfect, it is because Smith is too much in love with his dialogue. Smith is a gifted comic writer who loves paradox, rhetoric and unexpected zingers from the blind side.
|
| 80 |
Time
A tortured testament from a true believer.
|
| 80 |
Salon.com
Kevin Smith's comic-religious fantasy turns out to be the sweetest hot-potato movie imaginable.
|
| 78 |
Austin Chronicle
One of the most intelligent, engaging, and gut-bustingly funny revelations to come along in a while.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Mature, thoughtful and occasionally dazzling.
|
| 75 |
Charlotte Observer
A scathing, scurrilous, sometimes silly but often searching comedy about the nature of faith in the 21st century.
|
| 75 |
New York Daily News
A raunchy, irreverent, generally hilarious sendup of ritual and papal decree.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Examiner
Dogma' is Kevin Smith's fourth film and it looks like his first but I'm not ready to quit him -- there's a landmark in him. I just wish the crafty, raucous Dogma was it.
|
| 75 |
TNT RoughCut
Frequently hilarious, often profound, and occasionally stupid.
|
| 75 |
Boston Globe
Has that rarest of qualities in movies that think of themselves as religious. I'm talking about the vision thing. And the ability to make morality entertaining.
|
| 75 |
Baltimore Sun
Suffused with a sophomoric sensibility that belies its more serious underpinnings.
|
| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
A raucous, profane but surprisingly endearing piece of work.
|
| 70 |
The New York Times
Smith makes a big, gutsy leap into questions of faith and religion. He miraculously emerges with his humor intact and his wings unsinged.
|
| 70 |
Film.com
Smith has crammed the film with enough genuinely funny moments and insightful bits to make it well worth seeing.
|
| 70 |
LA Weekly
A profession of faith, made with the confident disrespect of a true believer.
|
| 70 |
Dallas Observer
Smith has fashioned a complex, contemporary Bible epic on his own terms. By turns crafty and clunky, pious and profane, it's clearly a labor of love.
|
| 63 |
New York Post
Kevin Smith's attempt to combine sketchy low comedy with long-winded theological speculation results in a mostly unfunny and occasionally tedious mess.
|
| 63 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
It does commit a cardinal sin of filmmaking. It's boring.
|
| 63 |
Miami Herald
As funny as a lot of the film is, Dogma remains as frustratingly uneven as the rest of Smith's work.
|
| 63 |
Chicago Tribune
Smith's strongest suit is writing dialogue that slips smart insights in between pop-culture references and raunchy language.
|
| 63 |
USA Today
There is a keen intellect behind this devoutly defiant fable.
|
| 60 |
Slate
The first truly countercultural apocalypse fantasy.
|
| 60 |
TV Guide
Say what you will about (Smith's) sense of humor, genuine faith is rare enough in popular culture to make any sighting worthy of note.
|
| 58 |
Portland Oregonian
Dotted with real laughs and held together by some solid acting, but it's built of a fairly flaccid narrative and some really amateurish sequences.
|
| 50 |
Film.com
A surprisingly adult exploration of religion refracted, as always, through (Smith's) insistently pop-culture kaleidoscope.
|
| 50 |
Newsweek
Jeff Giles
As preposterous as the movie gets, it's clearly reveling in its own hokiness.
|
| 50 |
Christian Science Monitor
Wildly irreverent fantasy.
|
| 42 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Smith has badly overextended his modest filmmaking gifts.
|
| 40 |
Washington Post
For a while, the film is screamingly funny, but the further it goes, the more muddled the narrative becomes.
|
| 40 |
Film.com
(Smith) seems out of his depth in this talky, rambling religious satire.
|
| 40 |
Variety
A very vulgar pro-faith comedy rather than a sacrilegious goof, Dogma is an extraordinarily uneven film.
|
| 30 |
Chicago Reader
If you're an 11-year-old boy at heart, this is undoubtedly even better than the pile of dinosaur shit in Jurassic Park.
|
| 30 |
Village Voice
A tediously childish exhibition.
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