Crash
Fine Line Features | Release Date: March 21, 1997 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
53
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 23 Critic Reviews
Positive:
10
Mixed:
8
Negative:
5

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
EmpireKim Newman
However, as with Dead Ringers, Cronenberg approaches a touchy concept with a mixture of icy tact and cinematic daring, always informing the wilfully perverse material with a penetrating intelligence and (almost subliminally) very black wit. Read full review
100
USA TodayChristopher Sharrett
Crash seems incredibly prescient, yet rather naive. The film is a stunning document of our alienated civilization, all the more compelling with its dolorous, almost liturgical tones. Read full review
90
Chicago ReaderJonathan Rosenbaum
Compared with the novel, the movie might seem predictable. But compared with other movies, it stands alone. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Cronenberg has made a movie that is pornographic in form, but not in result. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
You may well hate Crash, but if intensity is what you seek in a darkened theatre, you'll hate missing it even more. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter Bradshaw
Crash is still creepy, still menacing, still hypnotic, and it is still dedicated, in its freaky way, to the ideal of eroticism, to just drifting from erotic scene to erotic scene without much need for story. But Crash is no longer so contemporary. [4K re-release] Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleEdward Guthmann
I'm not quite sure what David Cronenberg is trying to say in Crash, but whatever it is, he deserves a lot of credit for having the nerve to put it on screen and face the consequences. Read full review
70
SalonRobin Dougherty
The astonishing thing, however, is how pleasantly hypnotic the film is -- despite the fact that its subject is confined to peculiarly gruesome sex. Read full review
70
TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh
Adapted from J.G. Ballard's cult novel, a dispassionate exegesis of warped desire, Cronenberg's movie is suitably cold, cold, cold: proof positive that movies about sex aren't always sexy movies, at least by conventional standards. Read full review
70
NewsweekJack Kroll
Crash has no plot to speak of. It's a cinematic tone poem of collisions and coitus. Read full review
60
The New York TimesJanet Maslin
The Crash characters sleepwalk through this story in a state of futuristic numbness, seeking extreme forms of sensation because familiar feelings have long since failed them. It's a chilling, ghastly possibility that manages to exert a grim fascination. Read full review
60
Washington PostDesson Thomson
Crash doesn't extend beyond its most immediate sensationalism. When the movie does attempt to find a theme, it slams into a brick wall of mumbo-jumbo. Read full review
60
SlateLuc Sante
For a filmmaker who in Videodrome and Dead Ringers so elegantly broached the unspeakable, Cronenberg has here made a picture that is all surface. Read full review
60
The New RepublicStanley Kauffmann
None of the people in the film is realized as a character: Cronenberg has no interest in character. Each person is given a dab of characteristics and is then sent off to copulate. [21Apr1997 Pg 26]
50
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
Crash has a couple of concepts which are, admittedly, fascinating and original, but not a whole lot more. Read full review
50
San Francisco ExaminerBarbara Shulgasser
Cronenberg has said that he made the film to find out why he was making it. You may watch it for the same reason. Read full review
42
Entertainment WeeklyTy Burr
The only entertainment value is in imagining Turner's apoplexy when he watched Spader having sex with Rosanna Arquette's leg wound. Read full review
40
L.A. WeeklyManohla Dargis
For all the director's visual flair, his trademark flashes of gallows humor and his few good moments, there's never a sense that he's made Crash his own. Read full review
30
VarietyTodd McCarthy
Cronenberg is a master of creating and sustaining a mood of insinuating cool and dark allure, but while the director remains firmly behind the wheel for the first hour or so, he cracks up toward the end with sequences that send the film and the audience into a ditch. Read full review
25
Christian Science MonitorDavid Sterritt
David Cronenberg's movie is a chilly meditation on this theme, carrying some cinematic interest but surprisingly dull given the story's outrageous subject. Read full review
10
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
The filmmaking here is so glacially paced (the final script was only 62 pages for a 100-minute film) and enervating that boredom is the most frequent result. Read full review
10
TimeRichard Corliss
An intellectual and a sensualist, Cronenberg graces Crash with philosophical musings, acres of pretty flesh and even more penis talk than on some 8 o'clock sitcoms. For all that, Crash doesn't work. Read full review
0
Dallas ObserverMichael Sragow
Cult auteur David Cronenberg crashes and burns--his talent, that is--in Crash, a vain attempt at a techno-age Persona. Read full review
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