| 100 |
Baltimore Sun
Twisted is an unusual forensic crime film because it's witty and sophisticated as well as taut and creepy.
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| 50 |
Miami Herald
Twisted is a movie so derivative it's hard to pinpoint exactly how many other thrillers it poaches from.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Tribune
A neo-noir movie nightmare gone sadly wrong.
|
| 50 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
By Twisted's final twist, though, it's all Judd can do to keep a straight face.
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| 50 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
It's always rather sad to watch gifted performers stranded in a tepid thriller. You can see them, as professional pretenders, trying to believe that they're creating a character, but the lie is transparent -- all they're really doing is advancing a retarded plot.
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| 42 |
Portland Oregonian
M. E. Russell
A snore.
|
| 40 |
Empire
Anna Smith
The movie may dole out a few guilty pleasures, but you won’t believe a word of it.
|
| 40 |
The New York Times
Laborious and nonsensical psychological thriller, a mediocre piece of studio hackwork unredeemed by a first-rate director.
|
| 38 |
Premiere
Sara Brady
Laughably clichéd, abominably written, astonishingly dreadful attempt at a psycho-sexual thriller.
|
| 38 |
ReelViews
Twisted is a D-grade thriller with an A-list cast. It's a disappointment from start to finish...But, in the final quarter-hour, it committed the unpardonable sin of insulting my intelligence.
|
| 38 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Walks like a thriller and talks like a thriller, but it squawks like a turkey.
|
| 38 |
USA Today
This is by far Kaufman's worst outing since becoming a major filmmaker more than a quarter-century ago, and the fact that his only other stinker from this period is 1993's "Rising Sun" means that maybe he ought to stay away from cop melodramas.
|
| 38 |
Charlotte Observer
No one associated with the film tries very hard, from cinematographer Peter Deming -- San Francisco has never looked so drab -- to composer Mark Isham, whose watery jazz score is meant to summon melancholy but merely relieves insomnia.
|
| 38 |
New York Daily News
It's an old maxim that you can't make a good movie from a bad script. But with the suspense thriller Twisted, Philip Kaufman shows that you can make one that looks like it should be good.
|
| 30 |
Washington Post
A nasty, formulaic and unforgivably obvious procedural.
|
| 30 |
Salon.com
Totally unwatchable if it weren't for Ashley Judd.
|
| 30 |
Los Angeles Times
Twisted is rubbish, but it looks good enough, moves fast enough and does improve as it progresses, principally because its plot disintegrtes to the point of outright comedy.
|
| 30 |
Newsweek
Sarah Thorp’s lazy script lurches from the lame to the ludicrous.
|
| 30 |
Chicago Reader
Director Philip Kaufman's usual flair for erotic detail largely deserts him here, and this thriller seems most interested in lingering over battered and bloodied male faces.
|
| 30 |
Washington Post
Gives new meaning to the word "obvious."
|
| 30 |
LA Weekly
Insipid embarrassment.
|
| 30 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Combining the ludicrous with the lurid, Twisted is twisted all right.
|
| 30 |
Variety
A dreary, weary psychosexual thriller that's neither sexy nor thrilling.
|
| 25 |
Entertainment Weekly
A pretty lousy movie, which would be offensive were it not safely neutered by its own stupidity.
|
| 25 |
Christian Science Monitor
Surely it couldn't be meant as dramatic realism! But it is. And amazingly, the movie gets worse as it goes along.
|
| 25 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The movie is a resounding dud: immaculately composed and shot (very much in the Kaufman tradition), but riddled with crime-movie cliches, wincingly obvious in its plot twists and rather badly acted.
|
| 25 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Not surprisingly, only Samuel L. Jackson seems fully to understand that he's in a bad movie, and he makes a virtue of it, using it as an excuse to hang loose, overact and ride the scenes for wherever they might go.
|
| 25 |
Boston Globe
Eerily similar in its story line to "In the Cut," the much pasted Meg Ryan sex-and-death thriller that came out last year. Only it's worse.
|
| 20 |
Slate
Kaufman proves again how miraculously in synch with his material he can be. Directing a fourth-rate, maladroit, derivative mystery, he becomes a fourth-rate, maladroit, derivative director--worse even than a TV-movie hack.
|
| 20 |
Austin Chronicle
Ridiculously overwrought.
|
| 20 |
Village Voice
Jorge Morales
No mystery here: Twisted is D.O.A.
|
| 20 |
TV Guide
In the hands of a more gleefully provocative filmmaker, this variation on the standard erotic-thriller stew of sleaze, tease and murder, this ludicrous farrago might have been tawdry fun.
|
| 10 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Twisted marks a bottoming-out for pretty much everyone involved, particularly Judd and director Philip Kaufman, who should know better. The film is the creative equivalent of waking up naked in a puddle of cheap wine and vomit.
|
| 0 |
New York Post
So utterly devoid of suspense, energy or credibility it should have been shipped straight to the remainder bin at Blockbuster.
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