Elizabethtown
Paramount Pictures | Release Date: October 14, 2005 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
45
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 37 Critic Reviews
Positive:
8
Mixed:
23
Negative:
6
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
91
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam Arnold
That rare animal, a dialogue-driven comedy -- and a good one at that. While one or two of its scenes may seem a tad too talky for today's low-attention spans, the script is mostly razor-sharp acerbic and sophisticated. Read full review
80
EmpireSimon Braund
Crowe is still a master navigator of swampy territory, and any movie that can warm the heart and tickle the funny bone without selling its soul is to be cherished, warts and all. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Nowhere near one of Crowe's great films (like "Almost Famous"), but it is sweet and good-hearted and has some real laughs. Read full review
75
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
It's an uncommonly optimistic meditation on death and lament, befitting a filmmaker whose movies (Jerry Maguire, Singles, Say Anything), no matter their subject matter, always double as a celebration of life. Read full review
67
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
There are wonders here, but there are as many things that just plain make you wonder. By the end you're too addled to be truly moved. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
What's sad is that Elizabethtown contains two GREAT sequences. Read full review
63
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
Crowe likes to work with large ensembles...But he doesn't know when we've had enough, however interesting they all may be; he's like a guy who decorates a Christmas tree with so many ornaments that you can't see the foliage. Read full review
63
PremiereAllison Williams
Beyond the tunes, however, Elizabethtown falls short of actual emotional resonance, and is really nothing more than a passable "Garden State" doppelgänger. Read full review
60
The A.V. ClubKeith Phipps
Only a truly great director can make a film of high artistic merit, filled with personality and memorable scenes, that's still a borderline disaster. (Think One From The Heart or 1941.) So the heartfelt and woefully miscalculated Elizabethtown may be the film that marks Cameron Crowe's arrival as a truly great director. Read full review
60
L.A. WeeklyJohn Patterson
Crowe's undeniable gifts -- his well-crafted individual scenes and his love for his characters -- are more evident here than his flaws. Read full review
58
Entertainment WeeklyLisa Schwarzbaum
Think of Elizabethtown as Cameron Crowe's rambling amateur travelogue, one from a well-liked professional filmmaker momentarily so distracted by private notes scrawled on his souvenir map that he gets lost en route to telling his story of self-renewal. This undershaped, overlong warmedy is an homage to the memory of his late father. Read full review
58
Baltimore SunChris Kaltenbach
Cameron Crowe crams at least three movies' worth of plotlines into Elizabethtown, and gives short shrift to all of them. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterRay Bennett
Tedious humor and sentimentality bury what could have been a pretty good road picture. Read full review
50
VarietyLeslie Felperin
Although rich in screwball silliness and sharp one-liners, film lacks the narrative drive one finds in the classic comedies of Preston Sturges, Frank Capra and Billy Wilder, whom Crowe always seems to try to emulate. Read full review
50
Village VoiceLaura Sinagra
Where the earlier flick (Garden State), in its smallness, felt like an honest representation of writer-director-star Zach Braff's struggles with notions of home, Crowe's is a hodgepodge of great ideas and moods in search of a plot to enrich. Read full review
50
Dallas ObserverRobert Wilonsky
It's a mess, absolutely, more a collage than a narrative. Read full review
50
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
It may not be much of a movie, but it's a terrific concert. Read full review
50
The New York TimesDana Stevens
Elizabethtown is a long, lurching trip to nowhere in particular, but Elizabethtown is a place where you wouldn't mind spending some more time, though perhaps under different circumstances. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesCarina Chocano
A mess of a movie -- but a warm, friendly mess that's hard not to like, even when it tests your patience. Read full review
50
USA TodayClaudia Puig
Though it's no fiasco -- there's nothing mythic about its disjointed story -- it is a failure. Read full review
50
SlateDavid Edelstein
For all sort of reasons, I was disappointed that there is barely anything of Bruce McGill as the family's hearty swindler. And there is too much of Sarandon, whose big scene--a speech at her late husband's memorial service, complete with jokes and a tap dance--is the movie's most egregious misfire. Read full review
50
TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh
This lighthearted meditation on life, death, love and timing contains some genuinely lovely scenes, but they're buried in a shapeless jumble of cutesy-pie vignettes. Read full review
50
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie Rickey
An unmitigated, inexplicable, unforgivable flop. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
Audiences of a certain hipster disposition, in fact, will see Elizabethtown and pine for Zach Braff's ''Garden State," the movie to which Elizabethtown bears an unfortunate and inferior resemblance. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
That gift doesn't desert him [Crowe] in Elizabethtown, but he clutters his movie with plot elements that confuse the focus, the central character and, ultimately, I suspect, Crowe himself. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter Travers
The film's problems lie with the lack of spark between a wired Dunst and a bland Bloom, and the meltdown of Drew's mother (Susan Sarandon), who grieves by tap-dancing. Read full review
40
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
An especially lame variation on Crowe's feel-good formula. Read full review
40
SalonStephanie Zacharek
Elizabethtown is a sprawl, perhaps the victim of a kind of ADD of the heart. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
When she's (Dunst) off the screen, Elizabethtown goes dark and broody, stranding us with the morose Bloom during a third-act road trip that goes everywhere and nowhere at once. Read full review
40
Film ThreatPete Vonder Haar
The biggest problem with Elizabethtown isn't in its shopworn theme, but that it's perhaps the first of Crowe's movies (though "Jerry Maguire"comes very close) that really feels forced. Read full review
40
The New YorkerDavid Denby
Crowe is attempting a modern screwball comedy--the kind of thing that, sixty years ago, Howard Hawks, directing Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, would have turned into romantic farce--but he has scaled the movie as an epic and turned his gabby heroine into a fount of New Age wisdom. Read full review
38
New York Daily NewsJack Mathews
Crowe was going for something magical in all this, but the film is so affected and mannered, so preciously in love with itself, that it's painful to watch. Scenes go on and on, and when you think the movie's over, it goes on and on some more. Read full review
38
New York PostLou Lumenick
Rambling, schmaltzy romantic comedy. Read full review
30
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
A saga of static set pieces and strenuously clever notions, this is a fiasco of a film if ever there was one.
25
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
So many romantic comedies come and go without making the slightest impression. Elizabethtown is not one of them; I found it galling. Read full review
25
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
It's obvious now that the cinematic junk routinely released every Friday can be safely categorized as a mere failure. But this alleged comedy is a whole other species entirely. This is a bona fide, absolute, unmitigated fiasco. Read full review
20
Washington PostDesson Thomson
It's hard to believe the creative mind that gave us "Almost Famous," "Jerry Maguire," "Say Anything" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" looked up with satisfaction after typing 117 pages of this. Read full review
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