Aloha
Columbia Pictures | Release Date: May 29, 2015 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
40
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 36 Critic Reviews
Positive:
3
Mixed:
21
Negative:
12
Watch Now
Stream On
Stream On
Buy on
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Expand

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperMay 28, 2015
There ARE times when Aloha doesn’t work — and yet I’m recommending it for its sometimes loony sense of wonder, its trippy spirituality, its brilliant cast and because I seem to be a sap for even the Cameron Crowe movies almost nobody else likes. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesMark OlsenMay 28, 2015
Even with its off-balance, overstuffed storytelling, the film maintains a charm and energy that never flags, with brisk pacing and generally engaging performances from its deep-bench cast. Read full review
63
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezJun 3, 2015
Yes, Aloha is a mess. But messes can be fascinating, and there’s a lot of tenderness and beauty and heartbreak here, too. Read full review
58
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerMay 29, 2015
Crowe is deft at keeping the various plots spinning, but there are too many of them, and they don’t intersect pleasingly. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd May 28, 2015
Perhaps the energy Crowe could have expended on shaping believable characters went instead to the cultural context. Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriMay 29, 2015
The film arrives with both too much and too little to say. It comes at us in choppy bursts of brilliance and dopiness. That is at once its great charm and its great curse. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter TraversMay 29, 2015
It gives me no pleasure to report that Aloha is still a mess, a handful of stories struggling for a unifying tone. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleMay 28, 2015
Aloha shows how far a movie can go on charm alone. Read full review
50
Portland OregonianJeff BakerMay 28, 2015
What's really offensive, to Hawaiians and mainlanders alike, is that after more than 50 years Hollywood can't make a better Hawaii movie than Elvis did. At least he could sing. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliMay 28, 2015
Aloha is Crowe's worst film-to-date, eclipsing "Elizabethtown" for that distinction and raising questions about whether the director has lost his touch (á là Rob Reiner). Read full review
50
The New York TimesA.O. ScottMay 28, 2015
Aloha has too much story and yet not quite enough, and its rhythms are rushed and pokey. It skips like a record playing in the bed of a pickup truck. Read full review
50
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsMay 28, 2015
The setting and offbeat tone may remind some viewers of another recent comedy, but whereas “The Descendants” was a substantive meal, Aloha is a pu pu platter. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineChris CabinMay 28, 2015
After a while, the film's sing-a-song-for-the-world vibe, so buoyantly optimistic at first, becomes grating and smug. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsMay 28, 2015
Despite a blue-chip cast, Aloha is just frustrating. It can barely tell its story straight, and Crowe's attempt to get back to the days of "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous" is bittersweet in ways unrelated to the narrative's seriocomic vein. Read full review
42
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezMay 28, 2015
Aloha is bittersweet overkill. Familiar and unwieldy, the dramedy is one long, sustained and ultimately overwrought note of happy/sad wistfulness that loops itself into an echo of strained feedback. Read full review
42
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyMay 28, 2015
It happens. Really talented directors sometimes step into the batter’s box, take a gigantic swing, and whiff. Read full review
40
Screen DailyJohn HazeltonMay 28, 2015
A forced and often cloying romantic comedy-drama with a strong, Bradley Cooper-led cast and an enticing Hawaiian setting but a bewildering mishmash of plot threads and themes. Read full review
40
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierMay 28, 2015
Aloha isn’t horrible, but it does have a pitiable odor about it, like a dog that’s sat too long on the beach. Crowe aspires to Golden Age of Hollywood repartee, but something feels off, just as it did in “Elizabethtown” (2005) and “We Bought a Zoo” (2011). Everyone just seems to be trying too hard. Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternMay 28, 2015
All three sides of the love triangle are appealing, and the movie as a whole might have been winning if it weren’t for the absurdist style that was clearly dear to the filmmaker’s heart. Sometimes Aloha reminded me of John Huston’s cheerfully unfathomable “Beat the Devil.” More often than not, though, it left me yearning for simplicity and sweet clarity. Read full review
40
Time OutDavid EhrlichMay 28, 2015
The film is cut together with the haphazard feel of a posthumously completed record, its ungainly structure a macrocosm of the awkwardness with which the individual scenes are Frankensteined together into a lumbering monster built from close-ups and music cues. Read full review
40
The DissolveKeith PhippsMay 28, 2015
Whatever Crowe’s ambitions, Aloha feels like a tropical transplant of past work, and an unfortunate demonstration of the law of diminishing returns. Read full review
40
VarietyAndrew BarkerMay 28, 2015
Unbalanced, unwieldy, and at times nearly unintelligible, Aloha is unquestionably Cameron Crowe’s worst film. Read full review
40
The Hollywood ReporterSheri LindenMay 28, 2015
With the screenplay’s strained whimsy and pathos, not to mention its unpersuasive, at times incoherent musings on the politics of space exploration, Crowe squanders the star power at hand. Read full review
40
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzMay 28, 2015
Crowe can be a great storyteller, a terrific director whose characters make us believe in them and in what they're doing. That doesn't happen in Aloha, which famously means hello and goodbye. Stick with the latter definition here. Read full review
38
RogerEbert.comChristy LemireMay 29, 2015
As it stands now, Aloha feels like several films at once, crammed together and sped up, with results that are emotionally hollow and narratively confusing. Read full review
38
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Nathan RabinMay 28, 2015
Aloha is a marshmallow of a film: soft on the inside, soft on the outside and wholly devoid of substance. Read full review
38
Boston GlobeTy BurrMay 28, 2015
Aloha is as generic as its title. The islands exist solely as an exotic backdrop for the pretty Hollywood haoles to play in. Business as usual, and I never thought I’d say that about a Cameron Crowe movie. Read full review
38
Movie NationRoger MooreMay 28, 2015
The performances are passable, save for Murray — who goes ham, and Alec Baldwin, as a general who goes comically nuclear. He at least leaves an impression. Read full review
38
New York PostSara StewartMay 28, 2015
The film alternates between shoving its confusing plot forward and dropping dialogue bombs that fizzle. Read full review
33
HitfixDrew McWeenyMay 28, 2015
Whimsy's hard, honestly motivated romance is harder, and when you get both of those things wrong in the same movie, the result is almost too much to take. Read full review
33
IndieWireGreg CwikMay 28, 2015
Equally hobbled by an amateurish script and vaguely defined characters, the movie's long list of mediocrities have an anonymous quality, as though the director has been completely reborn as a hack. Read full review
32
TheWrapAlonso DuraldeMay 28, 2015
From “Vanilla Sky” onward, unfortunately, Crowe seems to have been stricken with some form of tone-deafness that curdles quirky into shrill. Read full review
30
Austin ChronicleSteve DavisJun 3, 2015
The entire movie has a creepy aura of self-consciousness. In addition to the aforementioned definitions of aloha, the word also doubles as a coming-and-going greeting in the Hawaiian vernacular. Here, it regrettably signifies the possible goodbye to a once-promising career of a filmmaker who had us at hello. Read full review
30
Village VoiceAlan ScherstuhlJun 2, 2015
Cameron Crowe writes movies like he's calling us in eighth grade with his heart on fire. Read full review
25
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallMay 28, 2015
All Crowe's movie has going for it is casting, a lineup of favored actors wasted in a screenplay unsure of what it wants to be. Aloha is by turns a love quadrangle that never materializes, an ode to Hawaiian sovereignty, an opposites-attract cliche and an outer-space weapons caper, all of which is clumsily executed. Read full review
25
Washington PostAnn HornadayMay 28, 2015
Somewhere on the incoherent pu pu platter that is Cameron Crowe’s Aloha, a nifty romantic comedy congeals and shrivels, inexplicably untouched. Read full review
More From This Movie

40 Critic Reviews

4.3 User Reviews

Details & Credits|Trailers

Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score
1 81 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
2 77 Project Hail Mary
3 75 Send Help
4 73 Hoppers
5 72 The Sheep Detectives
SEE ALL
Essential Links
New on Amazon Prime Video
New on Netflix
Coming Soon to DVD/Blu-ray
SEE ALL