Her
Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: December 18, 2013 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
91
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 49 Critic Reviews
Positive:
45
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
Watch Now
Stream On
Buy on
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Expand

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeDec 8, 2025
All the best science fiction on artificial intelligence is really about the challenges of being human. Her is full of strong, sly jokes and intriguing speculation on future technologies. But, ultimately, it is a sad story about the difficulty of making meaningful connection with any psyche, whether organically evolved or digitally tailored to the user's needs. Read full review
100
Little White LiesDavid JenkinsDec 8, 2025
It’s a love story for our time and for all time. Read full review
100
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaJan 10, 2014
Sad, funny, and quietly alarming romance. Read full review
100
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsJan 9, 2014
Her may be the most technologically astute movie since Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: a Space Odyssey.” And as the friendly ghost in the machine, Samantha is a more inviting companion for the great leap forward than HAL9000 could ever dream of being. Read full review
100
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezJan 9, 2014
Her argues that sometimes, crazy can be wonderful. Read full review
100
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanJan 9, 2014
Phoenix gives a performance as convincing as he did in “The Master,” and in exactly the opposite direction: gentle, meditative and cerebral, instead of angry, closed-minded and baffled. Read full review
100
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallJan 9, 2014
So many things could go terribly wrong with Spike Jonze's Her, and it's a small cinematic miracle that nothing does. Read full review
100
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzJan 9, 2014
Her is an outstanding movie, in part because of its originality, but also because of its execution. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeTy BurrDec 25, 2013
It is a love story. Also a profoundly metaphysical meditation on what it means to be human. Also one of the more touchingly relevant movies to the ways we actually live and may soon live. Oh, and the year’s best film, or at least the one that may stick with you until its story line comes true. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsDec 24, 2013
A delicate, droll masterwork, writer-director Spike Jonze's Her sticks its neck out, all the way out, asserting that what the world needs now and evermore is love, sweet love. Preferably between humans, but you can't have everything all the time. Read full review
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayDec 24, 2013
What’s surprising is that Jonze has taken what could easily have been a glib screwball comedy and infused it instead with wry, observant tenderness and deep feeling. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternDec 19, 2013
Mr. Jonze approaches perfection in the department of deadpan humor. In other hands, his premise could have been a clever gimmick and little more. But he draws us into Theodore's world, then develops it brilliantly, by playing everything scrupulously straight. Read full review
100
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerDec 18, 2013
The wistfulness in this movie is large-souled. Theodore may worry that his love for Samantha makes him a freak, but Amy knows that “anybody who loves is a freak.” All this may sound touchy-feely in the worst way, but Jonze is trying to get at how we seek romantic connection in this brave (or not so brave) new world. Like Theodore, he risks looking foolish. Read full review
100
New York Daily NewsElizabeth WeitzmanDec 18, 2013
Will you relate more to the bitter, or embrace the sweet? The choice itself is Jonze’s ultimate gift to us: an invitation to leave his film ready to communicate, debate and, most crucially of all, connect. Read full review
100
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Dec 18, 2013
Four films into a sterling career, the director’s made his most beguiling, profoundly human work yet. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranDec 17, 2013
Acerbic, emotional, provocative, it's a risky high dive off the big board with a plot that sounds like a gimmick but ends up haunting, odd and a bit wonderful. Read full review
100
SalonAndrew O'HehirDec 17, 2013
This is a handcrafted, passionate and sometimes impossibly beautiful film that argues for both the past and the future, with a poetic spirit that’s extremely rare in American cinema. Read full review
100
The New York TimesManohla DargisDec 17, 2013
At once a brilliant conceptual gag and a deeply sincere romance, Her is the unlikely yet completely plausible love story about a man, who sometimes resembles a machine, and an operating system, who very much suggests a living woman. Read full review
100
The DissolveScott TobiasDec 16, 2013
Her is a 21st-century love story that perfectly captures the mood of the times and finds new inroads into the exhilaration and heartbreak that have existed since the first “I love you.” Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinDec 16, 2013
In Her, Jonze transforms his music-video aesthetic into something magically personal. The montages — silent, flickering inserts of Theodore and his ex-wife recollected in tranquility — are sublime. Read full review
100
TimeRichard CorlissDec 16, 2013
Jonze creates the splendid anachronism of a movie romance that is laugh-and-cry and warm all over, totally sweet and utterly serious. Read full review
100
VarietyScott FoundasOct 12, 2013
What begins like an arrested adolescent dream soon blossoms into Jonze’s richest and most emotionally mature work to date, burrowing deep into the give and take of relationships, the dawning of middle-aged ennui, and that eternal dilemma shared by both man and machine: the struggle to know one’s own true self. Read full review
100
Slant MagazineEd GonzalezOct 12, 2013
A screwball surrealist comedy that asks us to laugh at an unconventional romance while also disarming us with the realization that its fantasy scenario isn't too far from our present reality. Read full review
94
Paste MagazineScott WoldApr 3, 2018
Far from taking the comfortable approach as yet another cautionary sci-fi tale of technology run amok, Her isn’t interested in holding a dystopic mirror up to society. Jonze instead posits a wonderfully original alternative to Skynet and the Matrix—in the future, the first self-aware A.I. won’t destroy the world, but it may just break your heart. Read full review
91
IndieWireEric KohnOct 13, 2013
Certainly his most deeply felt achievement, Her is both distinctly Jonze-like and something altogether different, as if the filmmaker has gone through a software update not unlike his artificial character. Read full review
91
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezOct 12, 2013
It’s an incredibly melancholy, intimate and yet often hilarious look at relationships and connection that provides a surprisingly great deal of insight into the human condition. It’s both sweet and considered, as well as observant about our fears, masks and growing alienation. Read full review
90
SlateDana StevensDec 19, 2013
It’s a wistful portrait of our current love affair with technology in all its promise and disappointment, a post-human "Annie Hall." Read full review
90
The New YorkerAnthony LaneDec 16, 2013
Sad, kooky, and daunting in equal measure, Her is the right film at the right time. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyOct 12, 2013
This is a probing, inquisitive work of a very high order, although it goes a bit slack in the final third and concludes rather conventionally compared to much that has come before. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesJan 8, 2014
If in previous films "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich" Jonze seemed a little squirmy about sex, his treatment here is fully adult and keenly sensitive to the complexities of sexual intimacy – how it relates to emotional intimacy, whether or not a flesh-and-blood body is required to achieve it. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliJan 13, 2014
It's audacious but also genuine. It's emotionally true and demands much from its audience not in terms of suspension of disbelief but of empathy with the main character. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperDec 23, 2013
Her works as a real romance, and as a commentary on the ways technology connects everyone to the world but also isolates us from legitimate, warm human contact. Read full review
88
USA TodayClaudia PuigDec 18, 2013
Though set in the future, Her is a timely, soulful and plausible love story. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversDec 18, 2013
Jonze is a visionary whose lyrical, soulful meditation on relationships of the future cuts to the heart of the way we live now. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyDec 18, 2013
Phoenix, for long scenes, is onscreen by himself, lost in his thoughts and those of the operating system moulded to fit his psyche. With his wounded awkwardness and boyish giggles, he seems authentically vulnerable, but the character’s emotionally arrested development also begins to weigh the film down. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyDec 18, 2013
Her remains one of the most engaging and genuinely provocative movies you're likely to see this year, and definitely a challenging but not inapt date movie. Read full review
88
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreDec 18, 2013
Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have logged on at all? Read full review
83
Portland OregonianMarc MohanJan 9, 2014
As the relationship between Theodore and Samantha evolves, it hews too closely to the expected arc of a romantic drama. In a desire to show how such a pairing could produce the same joys, sorrows, jealousies and insecurities as a human-to-human one, the movie edges close to parody, which it doesn't want to be. Read full review
80
Time Out LondonCath ClarkeFeb 11, 2014
Her is a keeper of a film, quietly dazzling. Read full review
80
EmpireIan NathanFeb 10, 2014
Jonze has made a sweet, smart, silly, serious film for our times, only set in the future. Read full review
80
Total FilmEmma DibdinJan 21, 2014
For all its techno-focus, a very human love story about our need for connection. Strange, witty, honest and curiously comforting. Read full review
80
Time OutDavid FearDec 10, 2013
It’s a tale of lonely souls and literalized online dating, and you assume filmmaker Spike Jonze will characteristically mix high-concept absurdism with heartfelt notions. Unexpectedly, the latter dominates, thanks in no small part to Phoenix’s nuanced, open-book performance. Read full review
80
Film.comDavid EhrlichOct 12, 2013
If Her is ultimately better at considering the future than it is at taking us there, it resonates as an insightful reminder that love isn’t obsolete quite yet. Read full review
75
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyDec 11, 2013
Jonze's satiric, brave-new-world premise is undeniably clever, but it's also a bit icy emotionally. Read full review
63
New York PostLou LumenickDec 17, 2013
Jonze seems to be heading for a far quirkier ending than the one he actually delivers, but he does tap into the zeitgeist with his unlikely romantic fable. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawFeb 18, 2014
I wished I liked it more. It is engagingly self-aware and excruciatingly self-conscious, wearing its hipness on its sleeve; it's ingenious and yet remarkably contrived. The film seems very new, but the sentimental ending is as old as the hills. There are some great moments. Read full review
60
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottJan 10, 2014
Even a flawed Spike Jonze film is a thing of beauty in its own way, and even the uneven but admirable Her is a journey well worth taking. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleDec 25, 2013
The story is too slender for its two-hour running time, and the pace is lugubrious, as though everyone in front and behind the camera were depressed. But the biggest obstacle is the protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix), who is almost without definition. Read full review
40
Village VoiceStephanie ZacharekDec 17, 2013
Instead of just being desperately heartfelt, Her keeps reminding us — through cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema's somber-droll camera work, through Phoenix's artfully slumped shoulders — how desperately heartfelt it is. Read full review
More From This Movie

91 Critic Reviews

8.6 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