Cloud Atlas
Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: October 26, 2012 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
55
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 45 Critic Reviews
Positive:
21
Mixed:
20
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
50
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzOct 24, 2012
Cloud Atlas is ambitious in nature, epic in scope and, ultimately, a big, overstuffed mess. [24 Oct 2012]
89
Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovOct 24, 2012
This remarkable adaptation of the supposedly "unfilmable" novel by David Mitchell achieves near-perfection on virtually all levels. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy BurrOct 25, 2012
Unlike "Tree" or "2001," Cloud Atlas offers more answers than it does questions, and by the end of its nearly three-hour running time - which flies by surprisingly fast, all things considered - it feels like the most feverishly expensive late-night college bull session ever. There are glories here, but they fade in the light of day. Read full review
60
Boxoffice MagazineMark KeizerOct 16, 2012
The movie version has the exciting and challenging parts down but the moral awakening it so strenuously wants us to experience remains beyond its reach. Read full review
50
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanOct 25, 2012
A tale that ought to dispel the clouds of mystery surrounding life gathers them into impenetrable fog. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertOct 24, 2012
It fascinates in the moment. It's getting from one moment to the next that is tricky. Surely this is one of the most ambitious films ever made. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsOct 25, 2012
The movie doesn't really work, but it's fascinating in the ways it doesn't. Then again, I enjoyed the spacey insanity of the Wachowskis' "Speed Racer," which they didn't even like in Asia. Read full review
50
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerOct 26, 2012
The result is maddening, exasperating, occasionally exhilarating – and mostly boring. Read full review
80
EmpireIan NathanFeb 18, 2013
Don’t let its commercial nosedive in the US tell the whole story. Cloud Atlas is a tough sell, but a rewarding journey all the same. It’s an adventure into the very concept of storytelling: magical, enthralling and thrilling as much as bewildering, pompous and potty. In other words, up in the clouds. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanOct 24, 2012
Cloud Atlas is certainly out to be a ''visionary'' mindbender, but the film's secret is that it's a nimbly entertaining and light-on-its-feet Hollywood contraption, with the actors cast in multiple roles as if playing a game of dress-up. Read full review
67
IndieWireEric KohnSep 10, 2012
Tom Hanks' appearances come across like scene changes between unfunny sketches on 'Saturday Night Live.' Read full review
10
L.A. WeeklyKarina LongworthSep 17, 2012
A manifesto in the form of an enormously budgeted quasi-sci-fi epic, Cloud Atlas is evidently personal, defiantly sincere, totally lacking in self-awareness, and borderline offensive in its gleeful endorsement of revenge violence against anyone who gets in the way of a good person's self-actualization. The rest of the time, it's just insipid, TV-esque in its limited visual imagination, and dramatically incoherent. Read full review
40
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranOct 25, 2012
Unfortunately, attempts to be original are not enough, they have to succeed, and this film's solutions tend to present themselves as alternately gimmicky and banal. Read full review
63
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezOct 25, 2012
If you're interested in the sheer craft of filmmaking, Cloud Atlas is required viewing - a rare example of a movie getting by entirely on technique and creative bravado. Read full review
80
MovielineAlison WillmoreOct 26, 2012
As is often the peril with movies of giant ambition, Cloud Atlas walks a crooked line between the glorious and the ridiculous. Read full review
40
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierOct 25, 2012
For all its strengths, the film is cursed by an ADD-style structure and a flashy but inevitably ineffective casting stunt. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinOct 22, 2012
The cast comes off like a third-rate stock company on the matinee after the night on which everyone got bombed on mescal (and possibly mescaline). Read full review
25
New York PostKyle SmithOct 25, 2012
I'll grant that the film has many layers. All of them are terrible. Read full review
45
NPRBob MondelloOct 25, 2012
The directors can make it fluid, comprehensible and gorgeous to look at, but they can't keep what struck many readers as profound on the page, from seeming profoundly obvious on screen, especially when every point gets reiterated six times. Read full review
25
ObserverRex ReedOct 23, 2012
Almost three hours long, a lugubrious sludge of mud soup called Cloud Atlas deserves a limp nod for pure guts, I suppose, but what I'd really like to do is burn it. Read full review
50
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaOct 25, 2012
Cloud Atlas is pop spiritualism, comic-book grandiosity, Zen for dummies. I can't say I didn't enjoy it on some level, but it's not the level of universal wisdom the Wachowskis and Tykwer would have us be on. Read full review
91
Portland OregonianMarc MohanOct 25, 2012
It has laser gun fights, forbidden love, and a rollicking group breakout from a fascistic old folks' home. What more could anyone want? Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliOct 27, 2012
Taken as little more than six disconnected shorts featuring the same group of players in different roles, Cloud Atlas works. It's entertaining and the manner in which it has been edited reduces one's tendency to lose patience with the less engaging stories. Read full review
63
Rolling StonePeter TraversOct 25, 2012
For all the spectacular settings and visionary designs, Cloud Atlas left me feeling disconnected. Sad. But that's the true true. Read full review
100
SalonAndrew O'HehirOct 26, 2012
Its too-muchness is also the source of its power; I was absolutely never bored, and felt surprised when the movie ended. It's an amazing, baffling, thrilling and (for many, it would appear) irritating experience, and for my money the most beautiful and distinctive big-screen vision of the year. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleOct 25, 2012
Despite some weaknesses, a sense gradually emerges in this film- not just an idea, but a strong feeling mixed with an idea - about the dance of good and evil over time. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineEd GonzalezOct 17, 2012
Its ideas are paralleled, its themes twinned, sometimes breathlessly, sometimes fatuously, into what may be described as a 164-minute pop song of seemingly infinite verses, choruses, and bridges. Perhaps expectedly, it soars as often as it thuds. Read full review
60
SlateDana StevensOct 26, 2012
Where the book is sinuous and oblique, their film is galumphing and heavy-handed, its rare flights of lyricism stranded between long stretches of outright risibility. And yet there's something commendable about the directors' commitment to their grandiose act of folly. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonOct 25, 2012
Superior filmmaking. Yes, it runs almost three hours - but you've probably seen 90-minute films that felt a lot longer. Read full review
25
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallOct 24, 2012
Cloud Atlas, surely the most incoherent waste of time and money on screen this year. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubKeith PhippsOct 24, 2012
Measured scene by scene, the film isn't always successful, and its transcendent moments make it easy to wish it could reach that elevated pitch more often. But Cloud Atlas is the sort of work where the big picture matters more than the details. It's an imperfect film of great daring and tremendous humanity, a work of many stories, but a singular achievement. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyOct 25, 2012
Even at three hours, the film feels truncated, which raises the question of whether the entire adaptation exercise might have chosen the wrong form. Stretched out to 10 or 12 hours on cable television, Cloud Atlas, the series, would be the talk of the fall television season, and the stories, rather than the thematic scaffolding, would be the right focus of attention. Read full review
40
The GuardianHenry BarnesSep 9, 2012
Tykwer and the Wachowskis' other twist on this karmic hokum - to cast each of their actors in multiple roles across the stories, regardless of age or race - is less successful. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerSep 9, 2012
Not quite soaring into the heavens, but not exactly crash-landing either, Cloud Atlas is an impressively mounted, emotionally stilted adaptation of British author David Mitchell's bestselling novel. Read full review
60
The New York TimesA.O. ScottOct 25, 2012
This is by no means the best movie of the year, but it may be the most movie you can get for the price of a single ticket. Read full review
60
The New YorkerAnthony LaneOct 27, 2012
One has to ask: does it allow for immersion? Even as we applaud the dramatic machinery, are we being kept emotionally at bay? [29 Oct. & 5 Nov. 2012, p.128]
42
The PlaylistKevin JagernauthSep 10, 2012
Too long by at least a half hour, and both dull and repetitive as it goes on, Cloud Atlas reaches for envelope-pushing storytelling but never delivers on its promise. Read full review
50
TimeRichard CorlissSep 10, 2012
Most viewers are likely to be impressed more by the magnitude of the effort than the magnificence of the effect. Cloud Atlas is a Terry Gilliam movie without the kinks, a Wong Kar-wai film without the smoky dreamscape, a time-and-Space Oddity that remains frustratingly earthbound. Put it another way: this is no "Speed Racer." Read full review
40
Time OutKeith UhlichOct 23, 2012
For all of Cloud Atlas's pseudorevolutionary blather about upending the "natural order," the execution couldn't be squarer. Read full review
60
Total FilmJames MottramFeb 9, 2013
A grand folly that makes the Wachowskis’ "The Matrix" trilogy look prosaic, Cloud Atlas is a fascinating if flawed work that will leave you gasping one minute and gagging the next. Read full review
63
USA TodayClaudia PuigOct 25, 2012
The cinematography is gorgeous and the makeup amazing, but the story lines are too disconnected. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeSep 9, 2012
As inventive narratives go, there's outside the box, and then there's pioneering another dimension entirely, and this massive, independently financed collaboration among Tom Tykwer and Wachowski siblings Lana and Andy courageously attempts the latter. Read full review
40
Village VoiceNick PinkertonOct 23, 2012
Each segment feels more like an extended trailer for itself than a sound narrative unit. Maybe this incompletion is purposeful, but it's a problem when what's invariably elided or taken for granted is the very human connection and commiseration that is supposedly the most vital force in the universe. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternOct 25, 2012
This would-be epic is beautifully photographed, elegantly crafted and adventurously cast. Unfortunately, though, it plays like a gargantuan trailer for a movie still to be made. Read full review
63
Washington PostAnn HornadayOct 25, 2012
While Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski haven't necessarily expanded on Mitchell's book, they've done a superlative job making it legible onscreen. Cloud Atlas deserves praise if only for not being the baggy, pretentious disaster it could have been in other hands. Read full review
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