Rules Don't Apply
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation | Release Date: November 23, 2016 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
60
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 40 Critic Reviews
Positive:
20
Mixed:
18
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
60
CineVueJohn BleasdaleApr 29, 2017
There's a wry comic sensibility that sees Hughes himself as an absurdity who seems half aware of his own ridiculousness. Read full review
60
Time OutJoshua RothkopfNov 23, 2016
Rules Don’t Apply flies along at an inhuman speed; the edits are sharp, skipping years at a time, and the production values are unshowy. Like everything this star-director has done, the film is deceptively smart. It’s just a little too late to the game. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzNov 22, 2016
It’s kind of funny, it’s kind of revealing, it’s kind of insightful as a glimpse into Hughes’ increasingly twisted mind, but it never adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranNov 22, 2016
Rules Don't Apply, as its name implies, is a movie intent on going its own way. It's not without its charms, but there aren't enough of them and they don't readily cohere. Read full review
60
The GuardianJordan HoffmanNov 11, 2016
It doesn’t make sense as a comedy, it doesn’t quite work as a drama, and it doesn’t follow the typical roadmap of a biopic, but Rules Don’t Apply is strangely compelling nonetheless. Read full review
60
Screen DailyTim GriersonNov 11, 2016
The romantic comedy-drama Rules Don’t Apply is, by turns, fizzy and melancholy, nostalgic and clear-eyed, but it never builds to anything especially substantial. Read full review
60
VarietyPeter DebrugeNov 11, 2016
Beatty tries hard to re-create the look and feel of late-’50s Hollywood as it existed both on-screen and off, aided by DP Caleb Deschanel and terrific costume and set contributions. And yet, it actually comes off too conservative for its own time, with stiff performances from Collins and Ehrenreich. Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinNov 26, 2016
Beatty is trying to elevate the material while at the same time draining it of energy. The movie is so misbegotten that it’s almost poignant. But I hope Beatty has a few more left in him. Read full review
50
ScreenCrushE. Oliver WhitneyNov 25, 2016
Rules Don’t Apply could have been an insightful look at a tragic, troubled figure. Instead Beatty made a conventional romance with lead characters we hardly care about. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Johanna SchnellerNov 23, 2016
If you call your movie this, you’re kinda asking for it. Some rules should apply. For example, characters should make a little sense, so when they behave in “unpredictable” ways, we can tell. But Warren Beatty, back in the director’s chair after 18 years, has gone rogue. Read full review
50
Washington PostStephanie MerryNov 22, 2016
If Beatty was not trying to make a movie about Hughes, he utterly failed, because the love story of Frank and Marla is more like a framing device — a gateway drug to get the audience into the theater so that Beatty can chew some scenery. Even so, he chews it quite well. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyNov 22, 2016
Aside from Beatty’s performance, the only consistent thing the movie has going for it is ineffable strangeness; it seems to be trapped at the bottom of the chasm that separates its subversive aims from its nostalgic pursuits. Read full review
50
The Seattle TimesSoren AndersenNov 21, 2016
Beatty directed and wrote the script, but from a man who made the weighty epic “Reds” and the corrosively funny “Bulworth,” Rules Don’t Apply feels curiously weightless and as forgettable as its title. Read full review
50
The New YorkerRichard BrodyNov 21, 2016
Beatty packs the movie with labored period references and unsubtle allusions to Donald Trump. He delights in Hughes’s high-handed wisdom, his high-stakes gamesmanship, and his petty idiosyncrasies, while looking ruefully at his paranoid reclusiveness. Read full review
50
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallNov 21, 2016
Rules Don't Apply is affably mediocre, even tolerable between brief pleasures. The movie's lone constant amusement is Beatty's madcap portrayal of Hughes, keeping aloft his Spruce Goose of nonromantic not quite comedy. Read full review
50
We Got This CoveredMatt DonatoNov 11, 2016
Warren Beatty's Howard Hughes retrospective, Rules Don't Apply, is equally tone-deaf in humor and drama, cobbled together in ways that never seem to fit. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreNov 11, 2016
Beatty, who plays Hughes in the picture, tries to give us a movie as wildly eccentric and asymmetrical as the man himself. He’s concocted a random romantic farce that isn’t romantic or particularly farcical. But random? Yeah. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesNov 23, 2016
Either way, Beatty has taken an object of enduring fascination and made him … not so much. Read full review
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