Grindhouse

Village Voice Nathan Lee

This monumentally pointless movie is best summarized by a line from Planet Terror: "At some point in your life, you find a use for every useless talent you have." Rodriguez, Tarantino, and Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it's about godd--- time. Go wasted, go stoned, go without your parents' permission. In paying homage to an obsolete form of movie culture, Grindhouse delivers a dropkick to ours.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Grindhouse, like "Ed Wood" and "Boogie Nights," celebrates how certain low-grade entertainment, viewed in hindsight, looks different now than it did then, since we can see the ''innocence'' of its creation -- the handmade quality of it -- in a world not yet ruled by corporate technology.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

I suspect that Death Proof will throw some of its director's admirers for a loop, though it may be the most revealing thing Tarantino has yet done -- a full-throttle expression of a singular artistic temperament disguised, like so many gems of grindhouses yore, as a glittering hunk of trash.

Film Threat Mark Bell

The only criticism that seems to merit any real discussion is whether directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino actually did make real grindhouse-style fare. To whit, I can easily say: yes, they not only made two on-point grindhouse films, they did them to painful perfection.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

We need filmmakers who can move us forward even as they maintain a sense of the past. To that end, Grindhouse captures a bit of rowdy movie history in a bell jar.

Slate Dana Stevens

You don't need to be an exploitation fanboy to appreciate the energy, imagination, and spirit with which Rodriguez and Tarantino pay homage to the cheapo cinema they love.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Tarantino and Rodriguez want you to cover your eyes in disbelief and get the unholy giggles at the same time. You do, but in two very different ways, and that's the movie's strength.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Critics are already comparing the two movies and largely agreeing that Tarantino?s story about a psychopathic stuntman who targets women for highway carnage is the best. I disagree.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

By stooping low without selling out, this babes-and-bullets tour de force gets you high on movies again.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

As much as I enjoyed much of it, I hope Grindhouse doesn't start any trends. Exploitation cinema is combustible stuff that only highly trained professionals should be permitted to play with.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

In all, it's a fun exercise in nostalgia but a three-hour homage to grade Z movies is a long sit. Grunge overload sets in early.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Like the best of its forebears, Grindhouse contains thrills to keep viewers in their seats, plus moments to think about on the ride home, which will probably seem unusually fraught with peril.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

The fun is in the one-thing-after-another delirium the movie induces, and in our breathless anticipation of what they'll hurl at us next.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Planet Terror delivers only momentary kicks...while Tarantino's Death Proof is a juicy, delicious treat, its pleasures stem much less from the play with genre conventions than from great dialogue and electric performances.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Value has been added as well -- the most thrilling car chase ever committed to film, a sequence that also shows, by cutting to the psychosexual chase, why fans embraced the tawdry genre in the first place.

Los Angeles Times Dennis Lim

A fascinating exercise in genre reinvention, a showcase for two radically different approaches to homage.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Gives dumpster-divers a chance to slum in the antiseptic safety of a multiplex. (Planet Terror ** (out of four) / Death Proof ***1/2 (out of four).

New York Post Lou Lumenick

To get to the best part first, Tarantino's adrenaline-pumping "Death Proof" is actually a good movie that - unlike Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," - rethinks its genre in ways that say something to contemporary audiences. And it's got some of Tarantino's best dialogue since "Pulp Fiction."

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Overall, Grindhouse may well be the Beatlemania of sleaze-movie viewing, but since the real thing is gone it's the best that many fans will ever have.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Where Planet Terror is all hollow, self-conscious homage, Death Proof is the work of a director striving to make something original while remaining true to the movies that influenced him. It is also, once it gets going, terrific, sensational fun -- precisely the vibe Grindhouse aims for, but only sporadically attains.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The kind of movie where it's necessary to put aside pretensions and enjoy the product on its terms, with all the sexiness, violence, gore, and camp as part of the parcel. This is three-plus hours of gleeful-but-guilty escapism.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Though it could probably use an intermission, Grindhouse is three hours of mostly campy fun.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

What's not to love?

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's inconsistent fun, and it's a little too layered with self-congratulatory irony to be truly transporting.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The Rodriguez segment is terrific; the Tarantino one long-winded and juvenile.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

The obsessive crosshatching of allusion, spoof and homage that gives Grindhouse its texture is the product of a highly refined generational sensibility.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

If you were keeping score, it would be Quentin Tarantino 1, Robert Rodriguez 0.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Grindhouse raises the bar for a certain kind of movie lollapalooza (and also for the kind of filmmaker who is also a showman, along the lines of a William Castle or Cecil B. De Mille). It's this injection of playfulness and fun and attention to the entire movie-going gestalt that will probably become Grindhouse's lasting contribution to movie history rather than any on-the-screen content of the movie itself.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Cool. Stupid. Juiced-up. Feeble. Stripped-down. Self-indulgent. Clever. Sophomoric.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

The best fake trailer, and Grindhouse's high point, is Edgar ( Shaun of the Dead) Wright's tone-perfect parody of inviting taboos, entitled "Don't."

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Their exhaustive tribute to hungry zombies, fast girls and faster cars is . . . exhausting, if intermittently entertaining.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Both impressive and disappointing. From a technical and craft point of view it is first-rate; from its standing in the canon of the two directors, it is minor.

The New Yorker David Denby

The movie won't do much for anyone who doesn't have an academic or fanboy absorption in junk.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

I enjoyed the invented trailers the directors fold into the mix, but despite the jokey "missing reels," these two full-length features are each 20 minutes longer than they need to be, and neither one makes much sense as narrative.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The films are bloody, stupid and buoyant in a kind of infantile way, celebrating mayhem, flesh and gore. Planet Terror is by far the livelier.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The mock trailers are for impossibly schlocky Z-movies with titles like "Machete," "Don't Scream," "Thanksgiving" and "Werewolf Women of the S.S." They're by far the funniest part of the program, possibly because they're mercifully brief.