Running with Scissors

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

The surreality is distancing, but authentic, believable performances and a low-key affect keep Running From Scissors from turning shrill.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

A reasonable facsimile of a perversely funny book whose odd characters are given life by a terrific cast.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

While Murphy never manages to make this crazy quilt dramatically credible, he does hit the mark for laughs and has written some juicy scenes for his excellent cast.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Kate Taylor

Wears a deep and sophisticated shade of black and is also very, very sad.

Village Voice Rob Nelson

Like the book, this deadpan celebration of neurosis makes a valiant effort to repress its comedy--which of course makes it funnier.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Ms. Bening's precise, pitiless tracing of her character's decline from feisty defiance to pathetic, overmedicated self-delusion gives the film an emotional weight it might not otherwise have.

Slate Dana Stevens

By turns cruel, self-pitying, and mordantly witty, Bening makes living with a delusional psychotic seem like the adventure of a lifetime.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Ryan Murphy’s jaunty screen version of Running With Scissors proves that nothing consecrates one's depiction of a narcissistic mother like having her embodied by Annette Bening. Bening's specialties are (a) insane people and (b) actresses.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

There's grace here if the movie were willing to dig for it. Occasionally it does.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Too much manic energy runs the movie off the rails.

TV Guide Ken Fox

The movie winds up becoming "The Annette Bening Show," and she's quite good: Bening makes the most of a string of mad scenes for which any actress would kill, and the real pain she brings to the part grounds the film in something real.

The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck

Too outlandish to be fully convincing, this adaptation of the best-selling memoir sacrifices subtlety for broad laughs.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

This dame is as sick as a sick dog on a hot day, if still always perversely amusing, and the story is constructed as a survivor's ordeal, not a colorful picaresque.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

From the moment he enters the picture, Baldwin looks good and sick of the whole scene. Unless you're in the mood for dysfunctional-family vaudeville, it won't take long for you to catch up with him.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

The hearty performances are undone by the forced eccentricity of the sets, the clothes, the music and, especially, the characters. The film is ugly and facile and childish in its love of its own naughtiness. Only Jill Clayburgh, as a creepy woman in whose home Augusten must live, feels human. The rest is no more real than a "Simpsons" episode -- and offers fewer laughs.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

Murphy doesn't have much of a handle on juggling laughs with pathos, and this makes some of the more touching scenes unintentionally amusing. The film, like Augusten's life, is uneven but not without its charms.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

While the attentive art direction of Running With Scissors pays scrupulous and imaginative attention to period detail, the film overlooks its greatest asset: Burroughs.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Alas, something happened on the book-to-screen operating table: Yes, Running With Scissors is rich, twisted, insane, mordant and ridiculous, but it is not funny. Not at all.

Variety Justin Chang

Writer-director Ryan Murphy strives mightily to capture the bracing hilarity, pathos and surreal incident of Burroughs' bestselling memoir, but this rudderless adaptation never gets a firm grip on the author's deadpan tone or episodic narrative style.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Watching Running With Scissors the movie instead of reading Running With Scissors the best-selling memoir by Augusten Burroughs is like running with a spatula, or maybe some weird toast tongs.

Wall Street Journal Joanne Kaufman

Ms. Bening takes her part and acts it all over the place, while Ms. Paltrow and Ms. Wood do their best theater of the absurd. It is left to Ms. Clayburgh, in a performance free of vanity and artifice, to find the movie's heart.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Running With Scissors lacks the edge of Augusten Burroughs' best-selling memoir. The result is an inconsistent tragicomedy that attempts to be cut from the same darkly humorous cloth as "American Beauty," but fails.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

A wildly erratic, often annoying but never boring endeavor.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Baldwin brings so much lumbering weariness to his role that we can't help feeling something for his character

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

In the end, there's also something distinctly distasteful about a movie in which the central figure casts himself as noble martyr while character-assassinating his parents.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

I'm not entirely sure, but near as I can tell, this adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' memoir of family dysfunction finally and irrevocably lost me right about where the cat ended up in the stew pot, stirred with maniacally morose glee by Paltrow.

Empire Will Lawrence

Well-acted by the superb ensemble cast but there just isn't a likeable character amongst them to care about.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

One expects neither subtlety nor surprise from a scenario boasting a household pet named Freud. If there's any reason at all to see Running With Scissors, it' Bening.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

For the most part, Murphy is pitching somewhere between "American Beauty" and "The Royal Tenenbaums"; indeed, the characters Bening and Gwyneth Paltrow play in Scissors are, in a sense, inversions of their roles in Beauty and Tenenbaums, respectively.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Murphy seems either incapable of or uninterested in creating a recognizable world, so local comic effects count for everything.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Laughing at the freaks and then feeling bad about it is the sole reason for the existence of this pale little film.