The Royal Tenenbaums

Buena Vista Pictures | Release Date: December 14, 2001

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

76	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 34 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

Watch Now

Stream On

Buy on

Stream On

Expand

Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Marjorie Baumgarten

A big generational saga that woos the audience with its humor, spirit, style, and ability. Genius here is an evolutionary thing. Read full review

Chris Kaltenbach

Isn't nearly the landmark comedy it thinks it is, but its quirkiness should appeal to the highbrow funny bone in all of us.

Jay Carr

There are laughs in it. But mostly you sit around waiting for it to be funnier, or at least funny more often. The problem is that it hasn't figured out a way to be funny while satisfyingly accommodating the pain in these characters.

Lawrence Toppman

Over the course of 108 minutes, The Royal Tenenbaums drops downward on the humor scale from hilarious to funny to quirky to pretentiously bizarre to chaotic. Read full review

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Far and away the funniest comedy in town. Read full review

Roger Ebert

Exists on a knife edge between comedy and sadness. There are big laughs, and then quiet moments when we're touched. Read full review

Mark Caro

More flat-out funny than "Rushmore," but in neither film is the humor joke-based. What you're laughing at is the behavior of characters who are so fixed in their idiosyncratic worldviews that they can't help but careen into each other like out-of-control bumper cars. Read full review

David Sterritt

Anderson's cinematic style gets more adventurous from one movie to the next, and he begins this story with bursts of originality that leave his respected "Rushmore" far behind. Read full review

Ron Wells

A very funny and painfully relevant two hours of entertainment. Read full review

Manohla Dargis

In a film that verges on greatness, it is a sign of terrific faith, as well as of Anderson's promise as a director, that when one of the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums wears hospital pajamas after a detour into grief, the words over his heart read "recovery area." Read full review

Kenneth Turan

Director Wes Anderson, who also co-wrote the "Royal" script with actor Owen Wilson, unquestionably has one of America's most distinctive filmmaking sensibilities, but that is part of the problem. As my mother used to say, too good is no good. Read full review

Connie Ogle

Once you're among them, the Tenenbaums -- and Anderson -- cast quite a spell.

New Times (L.A.)Robert Wilonsky

One expects more from writer-director Wes Anderson (and his co-scribbler, Owen Wilson) than such frivolous fun that bears no lingering effect. Read full review

Jack Mathews

The performances are all terrific, but Gene Hackman is close to a career best as the family patriarch Royal, the most useless man you can't help loving. Read full review

Peter Rainer

Anderson is something of a prodigy himself, and he's riddled with talent, but he hasn't figured out how to be askew and heartfelt at the same time. When he does, he'll probably make the movie The Royal Tenenbaums was meant to be, and it'll be a sight to see. Read full review

100

Lou Lumenick

You'll laugh, you'll cry -- the year's best movie. Read full review

David Ansen

In the antic, melancholy comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, the singular Wes Anderson (“Rushmore”) abandons his native Texas for a storybook vision of New York.

Steven Rea

A devastatingly funny portrait of a wildly dysfunctional clan, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums is a movie about how people never really mature in ways that matter. Read full review

Peter Travers

Anderson offers no phony uplift for the Tenenbaums or for audiences. But he does know how to take a sad song and make it better. In these troubled times, that's a gift. Read full review

Stephanie Zacharek

Anderson's other hallmarks here are brilliant gags that deflate in the execution, potentially interesting characters that end up so flat they feel as if they'd been cut out of paper, a plot that's all setup and no story. Read full review

Mick LaSalle

Might have been about the rise and fall of a family of gifted children. That would have been the typical way to approach the story. Instead, it's something rare -- a movie about people who have already fallen, whose best days are behind them. Read full review

William Arnold

It makes for chuckling entertainment and it's fun to watch as it's happening. But its New York characters are not a bit believable, there's no real bite to the humor, and the film never adds up to be more than the sum of its parts. Read full review

David Edelstein

Hackman gives the con-man lines a simple, straight-ahead urgency that makes the man first hilarious and then, as the pleasures of human company are withdrawn and his resentment begins to bubble up, inexplicably touching. This is a great performance. Read full review

Frank Scheck

Along with his writing partner, actor Owen Wilson, who also plays (hilariously) a supporting role in the film, Anderson reveals himself to be a highly original comic talent, impressive both for his strongly controlled deadpan style and for providing a sense of emotional heft lacking in most mainstream film comedies. Read full review

Dana Stevens

At once endearing and unbearably show-offy, it seems to be the product of a sensibility formed by age-inappropriate reading. Read full review

Anthony Lane

Spend an eveing with some of Edward Gorey's writings and drawings, rub against the velvet of his lugubrious wit, and you will be ready for Royal and the clan. [17 Dec 2001, p. 97]

Richard Schickel

For Hackman embodies the energy and outrage the rest of this rather twee family lacks. Royal stirs them all to life, and this great, bumptious performance by an actor gleefully rediscovering his funny bone stirs us to appreciative life too.

TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh

Precociously glib and never less than engaging. Read full review