New This Week
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search

Upcoming Release Calendar
Awards & Bests By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

sort by name

sort by score

34 10,000 B.C.
37 Air I Breathe, The
52 Be Kind Rewind
47 Boarding Gate
46 Bonneville
42 Bucket List, The
70 Caramel
49 Cassandra's Dream
44 Chaos Theory
54 Charlie Bartlett
64 Chronicle of an Escape
63 City of Men
78 Control
66 Darfur Now
59 Definitely, Maybe
41 Drillbit Taylor
36 Eye, The
46 Finishing the Game
35 Flakes
38 Flash Point
57 Flawless
29 Fool's Gold
41 Funny Games
66 George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
65 Grace Is Gone
57 Hammer, The
68 Honeydripper
67 In Bruges
xx Jack and Jill vs. the World
35 Jumper
9 Meet the Spartans
52 My Blueberry Nights
48 National Treasure: Book of Secrets
50 Other Boleyn Girl, The
90 Persepolis
44 Rails & Ties
46 Rambo
36 Remember the Daze
47 Semi-Pro
24 Sex and Death 101
76 Shotgun Stories
63 Signal, The
62 Spiderwick Chronicles, The
12 Strange Wilderness
45 Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns
59 Under the Same Moon
40 Vantage Point
55 Walker, The
37 War, Inc.
46 Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins
60 What Would Jesus Buy?
51 Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
17 Witless Protection

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Big Lebowski, The
Gramercy Pictures


9.6

based on 22 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 80 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

FILM:

Internet Movie Database

MPAA RATING: R for pervasive strong language, drug content, sexuality and brief violence

Starring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, David Huddleston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tara Reid, and John Turturro

A scattered farce about a pothead bowler who is mistaken for a deadbeat philanthropist.

GENRE(S):	Comedy
WRITTEN BY:	Ethan Coen Joel Coen
DIRECTED BY:	Joel Coen
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: November 5, 2002 Video: February 4, 2003 Theatrical: March 6, 1998
RUNNING TIME:	117 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA / UK

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

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

It's paved with delightfully irregular and unanticipated bits of business that stimulate the viewer to stay fully alert, while renewing our faith in the sheer joy of watching movies.

100

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

It put a smile on my face that never left for 117 minutes.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

With their inspired, absurdist taste for weird, peculiar Americana-but a sort of neo-Americana that is entirely invented-the Coens have defined and mastered their own bizarre subgenre.

Washington Post Rita Kempley

The movie is as visually inventive and wildly eccentric as the Coens' earlier movies, but it lacks the emotional maturity and moral clarity of 1996's "Fargo."

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.

Film Threat Merle Bertrand

Brilliantly scripted and full of a virtual Who's Who of familiar faces, The Big Lebowski is yet another golden hunk of totally unique celluloid from the versatile Brothers Cohen.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

This is a comic amusement park ride – a wildly uneven movie that offers tremendous pleasure for the moment, even if it doesn't stand up well to post-screening analysis and scrutiny.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Viewers with a taste for bizarre, even surreal, humor will have a ball.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

It's a pinball arcade of a flick -- the Coens invent a bunch of wonderfully flaky characters, stick them into a Plexiglas narrative, and let them bounce off each other.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Some may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn't the film's flaw, but its style.

Dallas Observer Michael Sragow

It's neither the clean strike Coen-heads expected after Fargo nor the gutter ball anticipated by Coen-phobes like myself.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Spiked with wonderfully funny sequences and some brilliantly original notions, The Big Lebowski, a pseudo-mystery thriller with a keen eye and ear for societal mores and modern figures of speech, nonetheless adds up to considerably less than the sum of its often scintillating parts.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Big Lebowski is packed with show-offy filmmaking and as a result is pretty entertaining.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Nearly everything in The Big Lebowski is a put-on, but all that leaves you with is the Coens' bizarrely over-deliberate, almost Teutonic form of rib nudging.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

This film feels completely haphazard, thrown together without much concern for organizing intelligence.

Slate Alex Ross

The great flaw in most of the Coens' work is, surprisingly, an inability to sustain a plot over a two-hour span.

Newsweek Jack Kroll

Frothing from two mouths, they parody film noir, megaviolent thrillers, sports allegories, ravaged-war-veteran movies, existentialist Westerns, even Busby Berkeley musicals.

New York Magazine David Denby

An off-kilter thriller with a sad-sack hero.

The New Yorker Daphne Merkin

The clever dialogue, seductive camera work, and beautiful production design (the lavish dream sequences look like Busby Berkeley on Ecstasy) almost make you forget the vacancy at the movie's core, but in the end there's no escaping the feeling that the Coens are speaking a secret language.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Although some of its parts are brilliantly executed and played by a terrific cast, the result is scattered, overamplified and unsatisfying.

San Francisco Examiner Barbara Shulgasser

It is a visual tour de force, but as a whole the movie slowly deflates into a cross between "Arizona" and "The Hudsucker Proxy".

TV Guide Ken Fox

If it's all supposed to be in fun, why does it feel so much like an insult?

The average user rating for this movie is 9.6 (out of 10) based on 80 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Chad W. gave it a10:
I recently saw this movie for the first time. I came in with low expectations - I was told it was a silly stoner movie. And I'm a pretty tough critic on movies overall and no big fan of stoner movies. Well they were right, it IS a stoner movie. And it is also absolutely freaking brilliant. As in hilarious. This movie absolutely gets into her head and won't leave it. Some scenes are now indelibly etched into my brain now. Among many others, the scene with The Dude morphed onto a bowling ball and rolling down the lane - between the legs of a horde of beautiful women - and to some groovin' music - may be the funniest and most surreal thing I've ever seen in film. So ignore the up-tight critics. If you want something really different and can relax and go with the flow, this flick is for you. As for it being a stoner flick, well, it probably wouldn't hurt if you lit one up while watching this film either. It no doubt would make it even funnier. Why not - he actors and the Coen brothers were all definitely under the influence while making this masterpiece.

John H. gave it a10:
This is absolutely the only movie which I never tire of watching. The overcomplicated plot is indeed just an excuse to tie together a melange of colorful and hilarious vignettes -- the Coen brothers recognize the meaninglessness of the story by showing us in the end that no kidnapping actually occurred. It matters not. The movie like the enduring music of Ravel is about style and flair over substance. And like that music The Big Lebowski is absolutely classic.

Steve W. gave it a10:
One of my absolute favorites...and I'm a movie guy...don't like TV. Several of the lower scores by the reviewers refer negatively to how 'scattered' it is, but frankly that's what it's supposed to be. The metaphor is bowling as life...and we're the pins.

Laurence B. gave it a10:
It is my honest opinion that this movie is the best cult film ever made. You can watch it over and over again and it never loses appeal. Immensely qouteable, fantastically funny, and full of great dialogue - this is the ultimate shaggy dog story. 'The dude abides...'.

Paul M. gave it a5:
Some funny stuff scattered about but overall I thought it was pretty flat, misfiring more than it hit. Occasionally clever and inspired moments were often undone by heavy-handedness and a tendency to overindulge in them. I kept feeling a real good movie could've broken out with a little more subtlety and nuance.

DK gave it a10:
Best movie ever... f*#k it dude lets go bowling.

Chris C. gave it a10:
This movie proves that critics don't have a clue. I absolutely loved this movie. I will be buying this one for my collection. Listen to the user reviews, not the critics.

Big Lebowski, The Gramercy Pictures

Big Lebowski, The
Gramercy Pictures