Being John Malkovich

USA Films | Release Date: October 29, 1999

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

90	METASCORE Universal acclaim based on 36 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

100

Jami Bernard

Gloriously inventive, delightfully nutty comic treasure is unlike anything you've ever seen. It's lunatic. Read full review

David Ansen

I don't know how a movie this original got made today, but thank God for wonderful aberrations.

100

Film.comElizabeth Weitzman

If we're allowed just a couple of truly singular discoveries in twelve months, it's a good year; when one of them is a film as exhilarating as Spike Jonze's feature debut, it's a banner year. Read full review

F. X. Feeney

It's a cheerfully deranged stunt, executed in a spirit of infectious lunacy that powers the resulting film to its strongest laughs, and weirdest depths. Read full review

100

Janet Maslin

Irresistable, nimble and very funny. Read full review

Jonathan Rosenbaum

This outrageous comic fantasy may not sustain its brilliance throughout all of its 112 minutes, but it keeps cooking for so much of that time that I don't have many complaints. Read full review

Film.comGemma Files

Surreal to the point of poeticism, amusing and tragic by turns. Read full review

Lawrence Toppman

It's among the most inventive, screwily funny and consistently surprising movies I've seen in years. Read full review

Mr. ShowbizMichael Atkinson

An ingenious, incredibly entertaining, Rorschach-blot meta-comedy based on a spec script (by first-timer Charlie Kaufman) that is completely unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.

100

Ann Hornaday

This smart, fanciful and brilliantly staged comedy takes a truly one-of-a-kind premise and makes it, of all things, a weirdly profound meditation on consciousness, identity, fame, gender and reality.

David Sterritt

(Jonze and Kaufman's) work is so bold, funny, and original that it's hard to believe they aren't wide-screen veterans. Read full review

100

Owen Gleiberman

The most excitingly original movie of the year. Read full review

Edward Guthmann

It's tremendously entertaining, and probably worthy of repeat viewings. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh

Bizarre, utterly original and truly indescribable comedy...You just have to see it for yourself. Read full review

J. Hoberman

The most offbeat studio comedy since "Rushmore." Read full review

Desson Thomson

So full of creativity, so subversive, so alive. Read full review

Andrew O'Hehir

It's a gleeful, nitrous-oxide high. Read full review

Michael Wilmington

Weird to the max, smart, sneaky as a Wall Street pickpocket and revved up with cruel wit and brazen imagination, Being John Malkovich is a dark movie comedy that you couldn't forget if you tried.

TNT RoughCutChristopher Brandon

Unfortunately, no awards committee is hip enough to praise this strange masterpiece.

100

Marjorie Baumgarten

A wildly inventive, unrelenting thrill that amazes us with its visual and intellectual treats and dazzles us with its ongoing ingenuity. Read full review

100

Film.comRobert Horton

Absolutely, see the movie. Read full review

100

Roger Ebert

Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains. Read full review

100

Film.comJohn Hartl

Breathlessly imaginative. Read full review

100

Lou Lumenick

Being John Malkovich, which contains not a frame of extraneous footage, is more than a must-see movie: It's a must-see-more-than-once event.

Kenneth Turan

A clever and outrageous piece of whimsical fantasy that is unique, unpredictable and more than a little strange. Read full review

William Arnold

It's essentially a one-joke situation, but screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and first-time director Spike Jonze definitely make the most of it. Read full review

100

David Rooney

Devilishly inventive and so far out there it's almost off the scale. Read full review

Steven Rea

So jaw-droppingly out there, so bracingly bizarre, and, much of the time, so fall-over-funny that even its flaws don't matter. Easily the oddest movie of the year, it is also one of the best.

Rene Rodriguez

This is the most impressive directorial debut since"Reservoir Dogs." Being John Malkovich is weird, all right-- the best kind of weird, the kind you haven't seen before. Read full review

David Edelstein

Everything I've ever dreamed of in a crazy comedy. It's close to pure farce, yet its laughs are grounded in loneliness, impotence, self-loathing, and that most discomfiting of vices to dramatize: envy. The action is surreal, the emotions are violently real. Read full review

100

Jay Carr

But then Being John Malkovich is a brilliant juggling act, too, brilliantly brought off. Read full review

Peter Travers

The crazy-ass imagination at work in Being John Malkovich hits you like a blast of pure oxygen...this movie of constant astonishments will make you laugh hard and long.

Richard Corliss

Weird, beguiling premise. Read full review

100

Wesley Morris

It's the film we leave most movie theaters wishing we'd seen instead. Read full review

100

Dallas ObserverGregory Weinkauf

Smart people will relish its temerariousness, average people will smile awkwardly and comment that it's "kinda different," and dimly lit people may mistake it for the Elmo movie and drool quietly in the back rows. It's a movie for everyone. Read full review

Mike Clark

The story keeps reinventing itself (some of the later plot twists are among the funniest), but a little goes a long way at 112 minutes - maybe 25 minutes more than this sporadically pointed conceit really needs.