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17
88 Minutes
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Paranoid Park
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Taxi to the Dark Side
80
Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
79
Visitor, The
79
Iron Man
78
Before I Forget
77
Rape of Europa, The
75
Young@Heart
75
Boy A
72
Lou Reed's Berlin
70
Outsourced
69
Redbelt
67
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
67
Snow Angels
66
Son of Rambow
65
Married Life
65
Water Lilies
64
Fall, The
62
Kabluey
57
Forbidden Kingdom, The
56
Leatherheads
56
Then She Found Me
55
Baby Mama
55
Pathology
54
You Don't Mess with the Zohan
54
CSNY: Déjà Vu
53
Sex and the City: The Movie
52
Mother of Tears, The
51
Finding Amanda
51
Promotion, The
48
Run, Fat Boy, Run
46
Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer
45
Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
37
Made of Honor
37
Speed Racer
36
What Happens in Vegas...
34
Happening, The
32
Chapter 27
31
Deception
30
Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour
27
How to Rob a Bank
24
Love Guru, The
22
Postal
17
88 Minutes
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Stepford Wives, The
Paramount Pictures
FILM:
MPAA RATING: PG-13 for sexual content, thematic material and language
Starring
Nicole Kidman,
Bette Midler,
Matthew Broderick,
Christopher Walken,
Faith Hill,
Glenn Close,
Roger Bart,
and
Jon Lovitz
Stepford has a secret. All of the wives are far too perfect, and all of the husbands are way too happy. The Stepford Wives is a sophisticated and comic re-imagining of the 1975 suspense classic. Welcome to Stepford -- the American way of love. (Paramount Pictures)
| GENRE(S): |
Comedy
|
Drama
|
Musical
|
Suspense/Thriller
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Paul Rudnick
Ira Levin (book)
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Frank Oz
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: November 9, 2004
Video: November 9, 2004
Theatrical: June 11, 2004
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
93 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...
80
LA Weekly
Ella Taylor
Contrary to recent rumors that it was a dud, the new Stepford Wives, with its chocolate-box visual style, archly heavy-handed foreshadowing and its scene-for-scene parody of the original's fright strategies (Walken's waxy menace is once again played for laughs), is a gas.

80
Newsweek
Cathleen McGuigan
Glenn Close, Bette Midler and Roger Bart (who plays one half of a gay couple slated for Stepfordizing) are hilarious, and even Nicole Kidman flashes comedic gifts not seen since "To Die For."

75
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
It's hilarious -- and on purpose, too. This is the first satisfying adult summer comedy set in New England to come out of Hollywood since "The Witches of Eastwick" in 1987.

75
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
The star of this overachieving trifle is not Kidman, it's Paul Rudnick. The New York playwright and screenwriter ("In & Out") has taken a pair of dated watermarks from the '70s - Ira Levin's horror novel and its faithful 1975 movie adaptation - and turned them into a broad, feverishly fey parody.

75
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
The 1975 movie tilted toward horror instead of comedy. Now here's a version that tilts the other way, and I like it a little better.

70
Time
Richard Corliss
A film full of smart laughs.

70
Slate
David Edelstein
I had a fabulous time. Well, I did once I accepted that it was a campfest--a great Provincetown drag show of The Stepford Wives.

63
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
Trying to be more antic and cuttingly funny, it misses the premise's shivery tension. The story loses us at precisely the moment it should put us in the vise.

63
USA Today
Mike Clark
You feel some of the strain in this immaculately shot, designed and costumed farce, but it's fast and the cast is lively, even though a lost-looking Broderick rarely gets to shoot his patented bewildered look.

60
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
Because the entire audience knows what's going on, the filmmakers hope to distract viewers from storytelling weaknesses with an urgent sense of style.

60
Variety
Brian Lowry
Another "remake" that merits the title in name only, The Stepford Wives isn't the "troubled" disaster that media reports have suggested it might be, yet nor do its oddly matched parts ever congeal into a fully formed creation.

60
New York Magazine
Peter Rainer
If the filmmakers had made a point of satirizing the new makeover culture in ways that went beyond camp jibes at décor and suburbia, they might have come up with a classic.

60
Empire
Kim Newman
Its funny, wonderfully performed by all, visually inventive.

58
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
The film's creepier moments are pathetically weak, and its thematic update fails to attain the minimal credibility that even a wild farce needs to sustain itself.

50
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
At no time do the men -- that is, the straight ones -- believably hold the upper hand. In the new town of Stepford, there's no bitterness, no struggle, no competition, none of the scars of the sexual revolution. There's just gay apparel.

50
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
Great casting ideas, like Glenn Close and Christopher Walken as "the King and Queen of Stepford," don't pay off, because the filmmakers' increasingly desperate twists alter the basis of the characters.

50
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
Close gets laughs, as does Bette Midler as a Jewish rebel. But the sting is gone.

50
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
Isn't so much bad as it is puny: a sporadically amusing, occasionally funny, but ultimately bland and pointless time killer.

50
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
Only Close, in a majestically, maniacally brittle demonstration of Stepford overdrive, has the courage to show how nutty the pursuit of domestic perfection is. In this mess of a film, she is perfection.

50
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
Before it degenerates into a complete mess, it's an entertaining mess, and something about its willingness to please maintains the audience's goodwill throughout.

50
New York Post
Megan Lehmann
Boasts a stellar ensemble cast and some priceless one-liners -- but those pearls of acerbic wit have been strung together on a cheap piece of thread which almost inevitably breaks in the third act.

40
Salon.com
Stephanie Zacharek
The picture is mildly entertaining and stringently unoffensive (provided you're not a supersensitive upper-crusty type from Connecticut). Yet it has problems from the start.

40
Village Voice
J. Hoberman
Almost desperate to show it gets its own point. What's funny is that the joke--"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" reconfigured as anti-feminist backlash--was scarcely fresh when Bryan Forbes shot the first movie version nearly 30 years ago.

40
Los Angeles Times
Manohla Dargis
It was somebody's nitwit idea to rip out the story's guts and brains for a sour sellout of a finale -- which finds the filmmakers behaving exactly like Stepford men and turning an original into a dummy.

40
The New York Times
Dana Stevens
It does manage to fire off a handful of decent jokes and a few sneaky insights before losing its nerve and collapsing into incoherence.

40
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to be--Rudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation.

38
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
A Frankenstein's monster of a movie: clumsy, patched together from parts that don't align properly, desperate to be loved, destined to be chased by mobs with pitchforks - those will be the critics - until it stumbles into its grave.

38
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
If the film is to work on any level, even a comedic one, it's necessary for the viewers to sympathize with Joanna and Walter. However, the script and scattershot performances keep them at arm's length. Nicole Kidman is in full scenery-chewing mode, and Matthew Broderick hasn't been this invisible since Ferris Bueller had to go back to school.

38
Premiere
Peter Debruge
Close is the best and worst thing about the film, delivering a performance that upstages even Christopher Walken (!), taking her over-the-top Cruella de Vil turn to its saccharine-sweet opposite.

30
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Keith Phipps
Rudnick is a wit, and his script allows everyone a decent one-liner or two. But the problem with one-liners is that they only last one line, leaving a whole movie around them that needs filling in.

30
Dallas Observer
Gregory Weinkauf
Lured to the project with John Cusack as her original co-star (cruelly replaced by Matthew Broderick), Nicole Kidman phones it in.

30
Film Threat
Kevin Carr
The story and themes behind The Stepford Wives are way past their time. Theyre products of the 1960s.

30
Washington Post
Stephen Hunter
None of it appears to be well thought out, or thought through, and it's consequently never remotely believable.

30
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
The movie takes a desperately wrong turn about 45 minutes in, and you can almost hear the great sucking sound as the whole thing churns down the drain in a swirl of narrative contradictions.

30
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
The result: an empty comedy that takes hackneyed potshots at consumerism.

25
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
The film contains so many endings that it's hard to tell what impressions the filmmakers want us to leave the theater with. Buy a copy of the book instead. It remains an excellent read.

25
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Liam Lacey
There is no tonal consistency from scene to scene, swinging from domestic drama to farce. Most of the actors -- especially Matthew Broderick -- look lost.

25
Portland Oregonian
Karen Karbo
So god-awful it falls into the category of needing to be seen to be believed. A purported satire of the 1975 camp horror classic, it succeeds in failing on almost every level, including knowing what it's actually satirizing.

20
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
Misbegotten is the only way to describe this remake of the 1975 film based on Ira Levin's cultural-zeitgeist novel.

10
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
A pitiful shambles of a remake, The Stepford Wives might have qualified as a rethinking of the 1975 original if there were any trace of coherent thought in the finished product.

The average user rating for this movie is 3.2 (out of 10) based on 57 User Votes
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