Alexander
Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: November 24, 2004 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
40
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 42 Critic Reviews
Positive:
8
Mixed:
16
Negative:
18
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
88
Chicago TribuneMichael Wilmington
Vast, riveting, madly audacious movie biography. Read full review
83
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam Arnold
It's boldly acted, absorbing and satisfying as a history lesson and chock-full of extravagantly brutal battle sequences. Read full review
80
EmpireIan Nathan
Unwieldy and flawed, but Stone remains a tornado in an era of airless formula and -- to paraphrase our Ptolemy -- its failings are greater than most films’ successes. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)Ken Tucker
As one of the few movies around not pushing state-of-the-art animation or Jude Law, Alexander is a damn good date movie. Read full review
70
TimeRichard Corliss
Makes for a long, lumpy trip with a charismatic guide and some brilliant detours. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
If, as the Virgil quote that starts the film claims, fortune favors the bold, Alexander has not been nearly bold enough. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
The best there is to say is that it's better than ''Troy." Read full review
63
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
What Alexander lacks in narrative clarity, it makes up for with pomp and pageantry. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
Since the movie lacks a vision of what Alexander was really about as a man and a figure in history, it falls back all too frequently on movie spectacle. Read full review
60
Dallas ObserverGregory Weinkauf
The creators of Alexander set out to make an epic, and they can't be faulted for the many elements that succeed on this scale; what's unfortunate is that they don't quite deliver a camp classic. Read full review
50
VarietyTodd McCarthy
At best an honorable failure, an intelligent and ambitious picture that crucially lacks dramatic flair and emotional involvement. Read full review
50
NewsweekDavid Ansen
Sometimes stunning, ultimately stupefying epic . Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
By de-mythologizing Alexander, Stone has turned him into an unbelievable individual. We accept great deeds from great people, not from sniveling whiners. Read full review
50
L.A. Weekly
What Stone has delivered instead is no folie de grandeur, but rather the last thing one would have expected from him: an honorable failure. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
Despite a three-hour running time Stone is too occupied with psychodrama to explore Alexander's innovations in battle, and Farrell, clearly out of his depth, seems less a leader of men than a Hellenistic James Dean. Read full review
50
SlateDavid Edelstein
Forget Alexander: The film is a pedestal to Angelina the great. Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
[Stone] gives us provocative notes and sketches but not a final draft. The film doesn't feel at ease with itself. It says too much, and yet leaves too much unsaid. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
Call it "Alexander the Grate," because, over the marathon of its three-hour running time, this wonky epic really does get on your nerves. Read full review
50
New York Daily NewsJack Mathews
Farrell plays all this as if he means it, but he seems slight in the role and without great physical presence. In a scene in which Alexander is roaring at his troops to rouse them to battle, he sounds like Mighty Mouse pretending to be Superman. Read full review
50
Washington PostDesson Thomson
Enjoyable in some places, but dreadful in others. It's boring here and exciting there. And it's almost always goofy. Read full review
42
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
An exhausted epic, one that Stone has directed with an almost startling lack of personality or vision. Read full review
40
TV Guide MagazineKen Fox
There are two stunning battle sequences, and that rose-tinted bloodbath is a stroke of the eccentric genius for which Stone is famous. Read full review
40
SalonStephanie Zacharek
Never have a great historical hero's accomplishments seemed so inconsequential, or so damned hard to figure out. Read full review
40
The New YorkerAnthony Lane
The happy couple (Farrell/Dawson) do enjoy one great scene together, and it's the high point of the movie-a naked tussle, in which she puts a knife to his throat. The whole sequence is quick, funny, and arousing, in sharp contrast to the rest of Alexander, which is sluggish, unsmiling. Read full review
38
PremierePeter Debruge
An ambitious disaster, Alexander is the rare historical portrait that leaves you feeling as though you know less about its subject than you did upon entering the theater. Read full review
38
USA TodayMike Clark
A movie that has neither dramatic focus nor a single memorable performance, aside from one or two that are memorable for the wrong reasons? Read full review
38
New York PostLou Lumenick
As huge a travesty and a bore as 1956's "Alexander the Great," in which Richard Burton looked equally uncomfortable as a blond. Read full review
33
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
A dreary, overlong and occasionally laughable classical epic about the great Macedonian world conqueror, it's guilty of a sin that no Stone film has ever committed: It's boring. Read full review
30
Village VoiceMichael Atkinson
Although inexplicable brogues and burrs appear and disappear, and although Stone post-produces the dickens of his movie trying to generate the maximum spit-fog of sound and fury, Alexander manages to be as dull as the Victor Mature films of the 1950s, which barely moved at all. Read full review
30
The A.V. ClubScott Tobias
Stone has made an excruciating disaster for the ages. Read full review
30
The New York TimesManohla Dargis
This is the costliest, most logistically complex feature of the filmmaker's career, and it appears that the effort to wrangle so many beasts, from elephants to movie stars and money men, along with the headaches that come with sweeping period films, got the better of him. Read full review
30
Washington PostStephen Hunter
Like every other second of more than 10,000 seconds in Alexander, it doesn't engage in the least. Read full review
30
Film ThreatMerle Bertrand
A movie celebrating the life of the greatest military conqueror the world has ever known should feature a bit more conquering. Read full review
30
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
There's no zest to the general depravity, no coherence to the script or the spectacle -- clarity is missing in some of the camera work -- and, most important, no character to give a Greek fig about.
30
The New RepublicStanley Kauffmann
After the three hours--though it seemed longer--I was still bewildered. Stone is a unique and fiery talent. Why did he make this film? Read full review
25
Rolling StonePeter Travers
Alexander breaks the key rule that makes movies move: Show, don't tell. Read full review
25
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
The movie is a monument to egomania - and I don't mean Alexander's. Read full review
25
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
This movie is an act of hubris so huge that, in Alexander's time, it would draw lightning bolts from contemptuous gods. Today it will get sniggers from stunned critics and a collective yawn from a public unlikely to share Stone's egomania. Read full review
25
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie Rickey
Both the sex and the battle sequences here look like football plays drawn by an NFL coach and shot by the wide receiver's mother. Usually, even when I don't like a Stone film I admire its frenzied energy, but the editing here is as lethargic as the compositions are perfunctory. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
Stone tries to make us like Alexander because he's good, when he should have made us want to watch Alexander because he's amazing. Read full review
25
Christian Science MonitorDavid Sterritt
It's astounding that the ingenious creator of "JFK" and "Wall Street" could make an epic on war and empire that's so utterly simplistic and unreflective. Read full review
11
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
It is, in a word, boring, and that's the most un-Oliver Stone adjective I can think of. Read full review
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