Reminiscence
Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: August 20, 2021 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
46
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 43 Critic Reviews
Positive:
8
Mixed:
30
Negative:
5
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
83
The PlaylistNick AllenAug 18, 2021
In building this mystery, and in proving herself as a major entertainer, Joy always has something up her sleeve, including her savvy ways to suddenly spike the plot with a slickly edited fight scene that builds the mystery instead of just taking a break from it. Read full review
82
PolygonTasha RobinsonAug 21, 2021
It’s depressing, in more ways than one, given its cynical take on what makes life worthwhile, and what we have to do to preserve it. But it’s also refreshing to see science fiction this aware of how actively we’re careening toward a terrible future, and how our response to it is likely to be specific, personal, and just as selfish as the behavior that gets us there in the first place. Read full review
70
IGNCarla RenataAug 18, 2021
Like memories themselves, some portions of the movie feel like they’re on a loop. Luckily, excellent performances from Hugh Jackman, Thandiwe Newton, and Rebecca Ferguson, in addition to some gorgeous production design choices, make this an intriguing watch. Read full review
68
CNETRichard TrenholmOct 8, 2021
Reminiscence is an assured big-screen debut from Lisa Joy, playfully recreating classic movie tropes with a modern twist. Read full review
67
The Film StageEthan VestbyAug 20, 2021
Even if certain elements are off, the major accomplishment is that Reminiscence is not boring. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Aug 18, 2021
The pleasures are of a borrowed nature, the stuff of third-, fourth-, maybe fifth-generation noir homage, just gussied up in sci-fi formal wear: all archetypes spouting purple verbiage while navigating a twisty missing-person mystery that pulls together, in the classic private-dick tradition, seemingly unrelated cases. Read full review
66
Paste MagazineJacob OllerAug 20, 2021
A film about nostalgic escape play-acting an old-fashioned genre has plenty of meta potential to comment upon the entertainment industry’s IP obsession and monetization of arrested development. Reminiscence isn’t quite assured enough for either. Instead, it’s pulp that hasn’t been boiled hard enough, its ideas slowly replaced by machinery. Read full review
63
The Associated PressJake CoyleAug 18, 2021
Like its characters, it’s drunk on what came before, relying too heavily on noir tropes. But its smart, thought-provoking concept isn’t so easy to shake off. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesKatie WalshAug 19, 2021
The modern noir style and genre innovation are such a neat cinematic twist that it’s a bit of a letdown that the world doesn’t always feel fully fleshed out. Read full review
60
EmpireOlly RichardsAug 18, 2021
It might have worked better if it took itself a little less seriously. Read full review
60
Total FilmJames MottramAug 18, 2021
The film falters mostly with its disappointingly one-note female characters ... It’s a shame, for Reminiscence has some impressive ingredients floating around in its murky mix. Read full review
60
SlashfilmChris EvangelistaAug 18, 2021
Reminiscence is so very, very close to succeeding. Joy has a great visual style – there’s a fight scene in a flooded room with a piano that’s genuinely stunning to watch – and the noir/sci-fi mash-up is often enjoyable. But Reminiscence never manages to feel like a memory worth revisiting. Read full review
60
The TelegraphRobbie CollinAug 18, 2021
It’s a film about memory which itself feels like the kind of thing you vaguely remember seeing 25 years ago. I’m not sure future slow-burn classic status awaits, but at a time when few studio films even seem to be striving for it, you have to applaud the attempt. Read full review
58
ConsequenceClint WorthingtonAug 18, 2021
When Joy lets us peek in these tiny, intriguing corners of her speculative world, Reminiscence comes alive the most. Otherwise, the rest of it fades like a memory you’d just as soon forget. Read full review
50
Original-CinLiam LaceyAug 23, 2021
Reminiscence doesn’t leave us much to remember it by, apart from those mournful CGI vistas of water-logged Miami. Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreAug 20, 2021
Reminiscence is the damnedest thing — a movie filled with promising concepts it doesn’t get around to exploring, because it’s dedicated to a romantic mystery that’s never very romantic or mysterious Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comTomris LafflyAug 20, 2021
Reminiscence aims for something existential within a well-recognized film-noir template. Sadly, the result is an unpersuasive, vaguely pessimistic dystopia at best, one that liberally pulls 101-level references from recognizable Hitchcock flicks and neo-noirs alike, only to drown their time-honored spirit in murky waters. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternAug 19, 2021
Almost every sequence contains references to other films. Spotting them is a pleasant distraction from figuring out the plot, an absurdly rococo structure that rivals the most flagrant befuddlements of “Inception” or, for that matter, the latter stretches of “Westworld.” Read full review
50
Slant MagazineWes GreeneAug 19, 2021
Reminiscence’s noir adornments inadvertently feel closer to parody than loving homage. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliAug 19, 2021
Although Reminiscence is made with care and competence and features a strong underlying premise, the film as a whole is forgettable. Read full review
50
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiAug 19, 2021
This wannabe works oh so hard to be a contemporary detective noir, with its shadows, damsel in distress and brooding narration. But it never finds the suspense or sensuality of that genre. Read full review
50
The New York TimesManohla DargisAug 19, 2021
Highfalutin, lightly enjoyable mush, Reminiscence is one of those speculative fictions that are at once undernourished and overcooked. It makes no sense (despite all the explaining), but it draws you in with genre beats, pretty people and the professional polish of its machined parts. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreAug 19, 2021
The third act’s twists and wrinkles aren’t worth the brain power it takes to sort them out. The scheme uncovered plays as low stakes, the violence simply an admission that “We need to give the audience something for their money.” Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperAug 18, 2021
It’s The Maltese Falcon meets Inception somewhere in the Vanilla Sky on the way to Chinatown in the inventive and ambitious but wildly convoluted and ultimately disappointing sci-fi noir Reminiscence, which careens this way and that, and this way and that, before running off the rails. Read full review
50
Vanity FairRichard LawsonAug 18, 2021
The film doesn’t do much to distinguish itself, or to retain audience interest. Jackman, dutiful thespian as always, gives it his all, but the specter his character is running after doesn’t have enough shape, or meaning. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyAug 18, 2021
Writer-director Lisa Joy doesn’t lack for ideas. It’s just that there are too many and few of them original. Read full review
50
VarietyOwen GleibermanAug 18, 2021
Reminiscence plays like a perfectly calibrated two-hour mirage of things we’ve seen before. Read full review
50
Washington PostPat PaduaAug 18, 2021
“Reminiscence” has all the ingredients for electrifying summer entertainment. But despite its considerable star power and impressive set pieces, the sprawling meditation on memory is simply an attractive mess. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonAug 18, 2021
Reminiscence is never not interesting, but Joy leaves a lot of the intriguing issues unsatisfactorily explored. Read full review
42
IndieWireDavid EhrlichAug 18, 2021
It’s an absolute slog to watch Jackman row this way and that in search of something to justify this movie’s labored metaphors. Read full review
42
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattAug 18, 2021
Writer-director Lisa Joy (Westworld) seems to be aiming for an Inception-style metaphysical mind-bend, with the sci-fi jolt of Minority Report and a bleak splash of Waterworld. But her intentions get lost in some cloudy marine layer in between, sunk by hammy hard-boiled dialogue and a story that leaves logic at the door. Read full review
40
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Sarah HagiAug 23, 2021
For a film about memories, Reminiscence is ultimately truly forgettable. Read full review
40
The Observer (UK)Simran HansAug 22, 2021
From his cheesy narration (“Nothing is more addictive than the past,” Nick solemnly opines) to the movie’s double-crossing femme fatale and nocturnal, neon-lit setting, the director has great fun playing with genre tropes, but it’s unclear whether she’s going for heightened camp. Read full review
40
Rolling StoneDavid FearAug 19, 2021
Although Reminiscence doesn’t try to hide any inherent metaphors — what are most movies these days, really, but nostalgia machines, designed for those stuck in the past? — it doesn’t do much with the material besides fashion something like a dull-edged Blade Runner. Read full review
40
TheWrapSimon AbramsAug 19, 2021
It’s hard to get lost in Cameron’s images or Joy’s workmanlike direction given how often they’re overwhelmed by her flashy dialogue. Read full review
40
CNNBrian LowryAug 19, 2021
Too many of the points the story earns for ambition get deducted for execution in this jumble of ideas. Read full review
40
Time OutAnna SmithAug 18, 2021
Reminiscence has imagination to spare, but it doesn’t deliver the precious memories it promises. Read full review
40
The GuardianBenjamin LeeAug 18, 2021
The reminders of Inception become so distracting that the film starts to border on pastiche. ... It’s overwhelming, even suffocating at times, which is a shame because there are elements here that work independently, without the need for the Nolan playbook to be so obsessively followed. Read full review
38
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsAug 19, 2021
This one is strictly a welding job, grabbing parts of “Blade Runner,” a bolt and a nut or two from “Vertigo” (though not as much as “Phoenix” did) and notions of commercially desired fantasies of pasts real and imagined, straight from “Westworld.” Read full review
35
ABC NewsPeter TraversAug 20, 2021
Even Hugh Jackman's indisputable star power can't light up the pretentious, pseudo-poetic, sci-fi murk of this thundering misfire, which will only make you remember other, better movie mindbenders. ‘Blade Runner’ anyone? Read full review
30
Screen RantDebopriyaa DuttaSep 4, 2021
Overly reliant on tropes that have been done to death, Reminiscence emerges as an inert ghost of the past with no innate value or meaning. Read full review
30
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyAug 18, 2021
In a movie this overloaded with plot, the revelations are like a leaky faucet, just like that purple voiceover. In fact, there’s so much going on, much of it behind the literal curtain of memory, that Joy leaves little room for the characters to establish themselves in the here and now. Read full review
25
ObserverRex ReedAug 24, 2021
It slogs on, piling on scenes and memories of every sci-fi epic and film noir from Blade Runner to Chinatown, but who cares? Read full review
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