Dogma

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

It's not every day you get to see a movie that begins in satire and ends in reverence, but then, for Kevin Smith, they may ultimately be the same thing.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The first commandment of Dogma: Thou shalt not stop laughing.

Mr. Showbiz Richard T. Jameson

One of those special movies whose freshness and vitality are so bounteously infectious, your humble reviewer wishes everyone had the pleasure of discovering it brand-new and undescribed.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

If the film is less than perfect, it is because Smith is too much in love with his dialogue. Smith is a gifted comic writer who loves paradox, rhetoric and unexpected zingers from the blind side.

Time Richard Corliss

A tortured testament from a true believer.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

Kevin Smith's comic-religious fantasy turns out to be the sweetest hot-potato movie imaginable.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

One of the most intelligent, engaging, and gut-bustingly funny revelations to come along in a while.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Mature, thoughtful and occasionally dazzling.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

A scathing, scurrilous, sometimes silly but often searching comedy about the nature of faith in the 21st century.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

A raunchy, irreverent, generally hilarious sendup of ritual and papal decree.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

Dogma' is Kevin Smith's fourth film and it looks like his first but I'm not ready to quit him -- there's a landmark in him. I just wish the crafty, raucous Dogma was it.

TNT RoughCut Christopher Brandon

Frequently hilarious, often profound, and occasionally stupid.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Has that rarest of qualities in movies that think of themselves as religious. I'm talking about the vision thing. And the ability to make morality entertaining.

Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday

Suffused with a sophomoric sensibility that belies its more serious underpinnings.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A raucous, profane but surprisingly endearing piece of work.

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

Smith makes a big, gutsy leap into questions of faith and religion. He miraculously emerges with his humor intact and his wings unsinged.

Film.com Ernest Hardy

Smith has crammed the film with enough genuinely funny moments and insightful bits to make it well worth seeing.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

A profession of faith, made with the confident disrespect of a true believer.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

Smith has fashioned a complex, contemporary Bible epic on his own terms. By turns crafty and clunky, pious and profane, it's clearly a labor of love.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Kevin Smith's attempt to combine sketchy low comedy with long-winded theological speculation results in a mostly unfunny and occasionally tedious mess.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

It does commit a cardinal sin of filmmaking. It's boring.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

As funny as a lot of the film is, Dogma remains as frustratingly uneven as the rest of Smith's work.

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

Smith's strongest suit is writing dialogue that slips smart insights in between pop-culture references and raunchy language.

USA Today Susan Wloszczyna

There is a keen intellect behind this devoutly defiant fable.

Slate David Edelstein

The first truly countercultural apocalypse fantasy.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Say what you will about (Smith's) sense of humor, genuine faith is rare enough in popular culture to make any sighting worthy of note.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Dotted with real laughs and held together by some solid acting, but it's built of a fairly flaccid narrative and some really amateurish sequences.

Film.com Elizabeth Weitzman

A surprisingly adult exploration of religion refracted, as always, through (Smith's) insistently pop-culture kaleidoscope.

Newsweek Jeff Giles

As preposterous as the movie gets, it's clearly reveling in its own hokiness.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Wildly irreverent fantasy.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Smith has badly overextended his modest filmmaking gifts.

Washington Post Rita Kempley

For a while, the film is screamingly funny, but the further it goes, the more muddled the narrative becomes.

Film.com John Hartl

(Smith) seems out of his depth in this talky, rambling religious satire.

Variety Todd McCarthy

A very vulgar pro-faith comedy rather than a sacrilegious goof, Dogma is an extraordinarily uneven film.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

If you're an 11-year-old boy at heart, this is undoubtedly even better than the pile of dinosaur shit in Jurassic Park.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

A tediously childish exhibition.