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Big Fish
Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Entertainment


8.0

based on 43 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 115 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for a fight scene, some images of nudity and a suggestive reference

Starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Alison Lohman, Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, and Jeff Campbell

Director Tim Burton brings his inimitable imagination on a heartwarming journey that delves deep into a fabled relationship between a father and his son. (Sony Pictures)

GENRE(S):	Drama
WRITTEN BY:	John August Daniel Wallace (novel)
DIRECTED BY:	Tim Burton
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: April 27, 2004 Video: April 27, 2004 Theatrical: December 10, 2003
RUNNING TIME:	110 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Premiere Glenn Kenny

Big Fish really is a big delight.

Film Threat Clint Morris

A tale that's so enriching, so heartwarming, so funny, so touching and so breathtaking, you'll wonder why the king of wackiness didn't branch out sooner.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Director Tim Burton finally hooks the one that got away: a script that challenges and deepens his visionary talent.

New York Post Megan Lehmann

Even with Burton's imagination turning its trademark cartwheels, the film's big beating heart holds the whimsical offshoots steady.

USA Today Mike Clark

Has enough tasty bait to satisfy an array of moviegoers: Burton fans, Albert Finney fans, fans of tall tales well spun by experts and fans of movies that don't look like any other.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

A word of warning. Big Fish is so strange and so literary that audiences seeking conventional fare may get impatient with it. But it always takes effort to catch the big ones. This one is worth it.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

This picture boasts a story about a yarn-spinning Southern father (Albert Finney) and a sober-sided son (Billy Crudup) that gives it ballast and staying power beyond anything in previous, precious Burton fables like "Edward Scissorhands" or "Ed Wood."

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

An achievement of this magnitude is a stunning and extremely pleasant surprise.

Empire Ian Freer

In anchoring the whimsy to something more heartfelt, Burton is greatly aided by Billy Crudup, who underplays potentially cringeworthy bedside scenes with his dying dad.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Burton rebounds in a big way with Big Fish, a Daniel Wallace adaptation and visual feast that recaptures the fairy-tale simplicity and wrenching emotional power of "Edward Scissorhands."

Newsweek David Ansen

When it catches fire, this great-looking movie offers hilarious diversions.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Big Fish is a clever, smart fantasy that targets the child inside every adult, without insulting the intelligence of either.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The movie is a gently overstuffed cinematic piñata, crammed with tall tales -- with giants and circuses and fairy-tale woods, plus a huge squirmy catfish, all served up with a literal matter-of-fact fancy that is very pleasing.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Burton's film is an American version of the Odyssey.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Too well-made and well-acted to be entirely cute -- but the result is fairly tepid in comparison to the overheated highlights of Burton's career.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Like virtually all fish stories, it's discursive, funny, full of boasting, a suspect mix of truth and lies with an emphasis on the latter.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

There's delight to be had from watching Burton conjure up one fantastical Edward-inspired scenario after another.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Such astringent details as a banjo player plucking a few ominous notes from "Dueling Banjos" when Ed first lays eyes on the Norman Rockwellian beauty of Spectre ensure that the story's fundamental sweetness never becomes cloying.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

An engagingly whimsical, sporadically charming, frequently very funny Southern Gothic fantasy that somehow doesn't quite come together to be as magical or meaningful as it's intended to be.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The actor's job here is the hardest to pull off, since practical skepticism in a Tim Burton picture is next to villainy. Yet Crudup suggests complex grown-up feelings that makes the rest of Big Fish feel like an earnest collection of magic tricks.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

This is a theme tailor-made for Burton, although there are times in the movie when it feels like he's not taking enough advantage of it.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Big Fish of course is a great-looking film, with a fantastical visual style that could be called Felliniesque if Burton had not by now earned the right to the adjective Burtonesque.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

The problem is, there's just not enough Burton in Big Fish.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

But Burton and August have added anger to the mix, and it sours much of the otherwise wondrous tone.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

What is most disappointing about Big Fish is the nervousness of its fantasizing--a strange unwillingness, new in Burton's work, to trust the wit of the audience. [15 December 2003, p. 119]

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

For the first time, Burton seems comfortable walking around the real world.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Simultaneously beguiling and frustrating -- the product of an imagist and dramatist uncomfortably conjoined.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

It's nicely made, well shot, and reasonably well acted, yet it's enough to filet the life force right out of you. We need stories in order to dream, and to live. But that doesn't mean we have to buy every crappy one that comes down the pike.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Alabama setting is as phony as the one in Forrest Gump, and for all of Finney's effectiveness as a yarn-spinning geezer, his whoppers seem disconnected from his character and each other--a weakness Burton fails to resolve with an awkward Felliniesque finale.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Has moments of genuine emotion...but overall, the film feels like it issues from a place Burton doesn't inhabit.

Variety Todd McCarthy

The imaginatively illustrated but precariously precious film offers up a string of minor pleasures but never becomes more than moderately amusing or involving.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

What a waste of a fine cast.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

The most curious thing about this magical-realist fable...is how thin and soft it is, how unpersuasive and ultimately forgettable even its most strenuous inventions turn out to be.

Slate David Edelstein

The most fluid, lyrical, and even-toned work of his (Burton's) career. It's also the most boring by a factor of 10.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

A misfire. The film that wants to be lighter than air instead crashes to earth with the swiftness of a concrete parachute.

Time Richard Corliss

The film fairly groans from all the narrative gamesmanship and lavish romantic gestures...The unbewitched viewer may groan as well.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

An abundance of dull exposition building up to the son's attempt to cap his father's whoppers climaxes with a tedious flurry of Fellini-esque endings and Spielbergian fillips. The magic doesn't work twice -- or even once.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

The whole seems disjointed, incoherent and lacking in the startling originality of the other two Edwards (Scissorhands and Wood) who, half a career back, poured from Burton's distended outsider imagination.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Tim Burton is all grown up and getting serious with this wildly scattershot tale.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Big Fish stinks from the head.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

A disappointingly dull thud of a fantasy.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

A disappointingly dull thud of a fantasy.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

A long-winded indulgence in tear-and-a-smile whimsy, elevated above the merely irritating and saccharine by compelling art direction.

The average user rating for this movie is 8.0 (out of 10) based on 115 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Jack L. gave it a10:
It is a wonderful, heartfelt, lyrical story!!!! Just see it with a open mind.

An L. gave it a9:
The movie is a delightful story to be seen and felt. It challenges our cynicism of adulthood and brings us back to where our imagination begins, where everything is possible, where the world full of magics and dreams. The movie is a touching reminder to us: let imagination saturate our pragmatic, "scientific", factual lives.

Riren gave it a9:
An uncompromising compromise between morose reality and cartoonish fantasy. It reconciles the fairy tales of American youth, all the sweet things we enjoyed as children, with the cynicism and coldness with build up during maturity. In many senses, Big Fish is about the different kinds of love, and so many of the reasons we fall into them. Littered with over the top moments and brilliant visual art, it is probably Burton's best film.

Angela H gave it a10:
This movie is a great tall tale. Tim Burton really catches the attention of audiences with his work of art in this film. It must have taken lots of planning to make this wondrous film. No one film will be as amazing as this one.

C K gave it a10:
This is honeslty one of my favorite movies. I do not understand why it got mixed reviews. It is right up there with Lord of the Rings as the best movie of '03.

Drew G. gave it a10:
incredible, burton is a genius, his dramas r the best,big fish is epic,one of the best movies i've seen ever.

Joris V. gave it a10:
People who give this movie less then 6 doesn't understand it, and probably can't see past the archetypal clichés... This is one of my all-time favourite movies, visually magnificent and one of the best, moving and greatest stories ever... This story is indeed "bigger than Life itself... Definitely Burton's best, his magnum opus!

Big Fish Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Entertainment

Big Fish
Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Entertainment