Being John Malkovich

Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday

This smart, fanciful and brilliantly staged comedy takes a truly one-of-a-kind premise and makes it, of all things, a weirdly profound meditation on consciousness, identity, fame, gender and reality.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The most excitingly original movie of the year.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

A wildly inventive, unrelenting thrill that amazes us with its visual and intellectual treats and dazzles us with its ongoing ingenuity.

Film.com Robert Horton

Absolutely, see the movie.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains.

Film.com John Hartl

Breathlessly imaginative.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Being John Malkovich, which contains not a frame of extraneous footage, is more than a must-see movie: It's a must-see-more-than-once event.

Variety David Rooney

Devilishly inventive and so far out there it's almost off the scale.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

But then Being John Malkovich is a brilliant juggling act, too, brilliantly brought off.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

It's the film we leave most movie theaters wishing we'd seen instead.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

Smart people will relish its temerariousness, average people will smile awkwardly and comment that it's "kinda different," and dimly lit people may mistake it for the Elmo movie and drool quietly in the back rows. It's a movie for everyone.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Gloriously inventive, delightfully nutty comic treasure is unlike anything you've ever seen. It's lunatic.

Film.com Elizabeth Weitzman

If we're allowed just a couple of truly singular discoveries in twelve months, it's a good year; when one of them is a film as exhilarating as Spike Jonze's feature debut, it's a banner year.

The New York Times Janet Maslin

Irresistable, nimble and very funny.

LA Weekly F. X. Feeney

It's a cheerfully deranged stunt, executed in a spirit of infectious lunacy that powers the resulting film to its strongest laughs, and weirdest depths.

Newsweek David Ansen

I don't know how a movie this original got made today, but thank God for wonderful aberrations.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The crazy-ass imagination at work in Being John Malkovich hits you like a blast of pure oxygen...this movie of constant astonishments will make you laugh hard and long.

Time Richard Corliss

Weird, beguiling premise.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A clever and outrageous piece of whimsical fantasy that is unique, unpredictable and more than a little strange.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

So full of creativity, so subversive, so alive.

TNT RoughCut Christopher Brandon

Unfortunately, no awards committee is hip enough to praise this strange masterpiece.

Mr. Showbiz Michael Atkinson

An ingenious, incredibly entertaining, Rorschach-blot meta-comedy based on a spec script (by first-timer Charlie Kaufman) that is completely unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

So jaw-droppingly out there, so bracingly bizarre, and, much of the time, so fall-over-funny that even its flaws don't matter. Easily the oddest movie of the year, it is also one of the best.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

It's tremendously entertaining, and probably worthy of repeat viewings.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

It's among the most inventive, screwily funny and consistently surprising movies I've seen in years.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

This outrageous comic fantasy may not sustain its brilliance throughout all of its 112 minutes, but it keeps cooking for so much of that time that I don't have many complaints.

Film.com Gemma Files

Surreal to the point of poeticism, amusing and tragic by turns.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

The most offbeat studio comedy since "Rushmore."

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

It's a gleeful, nitrous-oxide high.

Slate David Edelstein

Everything I've ever dreamed of in a crazy comedy. It's close to pure farce, yet its laughs are grounded in loneliness, impotence, self-loathing, and that most discomfiting of vices to dramatize: envy. The action is surreal, the emotions are violently real.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

This is the most impressive directorial debut since"Reservoir Dogs." Being John Malkovich is weird, all right-- the best kind of weird, the kind you haven't seen before.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

It's essentially a one-joke situation, but screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and first-time director Spike Jonze definitely make the most of it.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Weird to the max, smart, sneaky as a Wall Street pickpocket and revved up with cruel wit and brazen imagination, Being John Malkovich is a dark movie comedy that you couldn't forget if you tried.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

(Jonze and Kaufman's) work is so bold, funny, and original that it's hard to believe they aren't wide-screen veterans.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Bizarre, utterly original and truly indescribable comedy...You just have to see it for yourself.

USA Today Mike Clark

The story keeps reinventing itself (some of the later plot twists are among the funniest), but a little goes a long way at 112 minutes - maybe 25 minutes more than this sporadically pointed conceit really needs.