Metacritic Film

Glitter

Starring Mariah Carey, Eric Benét, Kyle Thrash, Chris Tessaro, and Max Beesley

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for some sensuality, language and brief violence

20th Century Fox Film Corporation
Romance
100 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters September 21, 2001

The story of a young singer, Billie Frank (Carey), who overcomes a turbulent childhood and struggles to find her true family and her true voice. (20th Century Fox)

WRITTEN BY
Kate Lanier
John Wilder

DIRECTED BY
Vondie Curtis-Hall

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

14 / 100

Critic Reviews

60 Los Angeles Times
Glitter is the week's only major Hollywood release, and it offers considerable escapist entertainment while hitting an affirmative note.
50 Chicago Sun-Times
And above all, the film is lacking in joy. It never seems like it's fun to be Billie Frank.
40 LA Weekly
Glitter is, if nothing else, comfortable with what it is, namely earnestly made, wholehearted schlock.
38 New York Daily News
This is the worst performance by a pop star in a dramatic role since Madonna suited up for "Shanghai Surprise."
38 New York Post
Helplessly clichéd, predictable and unaware of its own lameness, it could easily become a camp classic on the order of "Grease 2" and "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
30 Washington Post Megan Rosenfeld
We don't have much space to tell you about Glitter, so we'll be blunt. This star vehicle for singer Mariah Carey is primarily a showcase for her breasts.
25 USA Today Claudia Puig
Even the soundtrack doesn't rescue the movie from its tedious banality.
25 Miami Herald
Glitter, the kind of movie only 11-year-old girls who dot their i's with hearts would find bearable.
25 Boston Globe Joan Anderman
It touches on universal themes of love, friendship, and family. Suffice to say it falls dreadfully short.
25 Entertainment Weekly
It's doubtful that even a real actress could have triumphed over the rusty tinsel of Glitter, a hapless, retro-'80s ''Star Is Born.''
25 Philadelphia Inquirer
"Zis is not verking! Zee glitter cannot overpower zee artist!" That, in a sentence, sums up what is wrong with this picture.
25 San Francisco Chronicle Carla Meyer
It doesn't help that Glitter is such a derivative mishmash of cinematic and real-life situations that it's nearly impossible to count all the ways.
20 TV Guide
A butt-numbing exercise in tedium, sporadically redeemed by moments of unintentional hilarity.
20 Mr. Showbiz
Take the G out of Glitter and it's litter.
12 Baltimore Sun
Glitter does no one any favors.
10 Variety
Glitter deserves yet another title: "A Star Is Dull." As phony a vehicle as one could possibly concoct for a wannabe movie star, pic carries Mariah Carey into a swamp of gloppy melodrama.
10 Village Voice
A heart-wrenching debacle from the starting gun.
10 The New York Times
Mostly dross, an unintentionally hilarious compendium of time-tested cinematic clichés that illustrates the chasm between hopeful imitation and successful duplication.
10 Salon.com
I desperately wanted Glitter to be trashy and over-the-top, to be so courageously awful. As it is, it isn't nearly bad enough to be that kind of good. It's simply there, all dressed up with no place to go, and that's the most damning thing you could say about it.
10 Film Threat
Just when you think it could not get more ridiculous, Hall, Lanier, and Miss Mariah go that extra mile.
0 Austin Chronicle
Assure Patient, who has paranoid delusions about Jennifer Lopez being molded into the new M______ C_____, to rest easy because Lopez has never made a film as bad as Glitter.
0 Wall Street Journal
How could a major studio -- in this case 20th Century Fox -- put its name on a production with a dim-bulb, tone-deaf script that piles howler on howler? Why couldn't someone save poor Ms. Carey from herself?
0 New Times (L.A.)
Worst movie of the year.

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