Running with Scissors
TriStar Pictures | Release Date: October 20, 2006 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
52
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 32 Critic Reviews
Positive:
11
Mixed:
18
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
83
The A.V. ClubTasha Robinson
The surreality is distancing, but authentic, believable performances and a low-key affect keep Running From Scissors from turning shrill. Read full review
75
New York Daily NewsJack Mathews
A reasonable facsimile of a perversely funny book whose odd characters are given life by a terrific cast. Read full review
75
New York PostLou Lumenick
While Murphy never manages to make this crazy quilt dramatically credible, he does hit the mark for laughs and has written some juicy scenes for his excellent cast. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate Taylor
Wears a deep and sophisticated shade of black and is also very, very sad. Read full review
70
Village VoiceRob Nelson
Like the book, this deadpan celebration of neurosis makes a valiant effort to repress its comedy--which of course makes it funnier. Read full review
70
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
Ms. Bening's precise, pitiless tracing of her character's decline from feisty defiance to pathetic, overmedicated self-delusion gives the film an emotional weight it might not otherwise have. Read full review
70
SlateDana Stevens
By turns cruel, self-pitying, and mordantly witty, Bening makes living with a delusional psychotic seem like the adventure of a lifetime. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
Ryan Murphy’s jaunty screen version of Running With Scissors proves that nothing consecrates one's depiction of a narcissistic mother like having her embodied by Annette Bening. Bening's specialties are (a) insane people and (b) actresses. Read full review
63
TV Guide MagazineKen Fox
The movie winds up becoming "The Annette Bening Show," and she's quite good: Bening makes the most of a string of mad scenes for which any actress would kill, and the real pain she brings to the part grounds the film in something real. Read full review
63
Rolling StonePeter Travers
Too much manic energy runs the movie off the rails. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy Burr
There's grace here if the movie were willing to dig for it. Occasionally it does. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterFrank Scheck
Too outlandish to be fully convincing, this adaptation of the best-selling memoir sacrifices subtlety for broad laughs. Read full review
60
Washington PostStephen Hunter
This dame is as sick as a sick dog on a hot day, if still always perversely amusing, and the story is constructed as a survivor's ordeal, not a colorful picaresque. Read full review
58
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
From the moment he enters the picture, Baldwin looks good and sick of the whole scene. Unless you're in the mood for dysfunctional-family vaudeville, it won't take long for you to catch up with him. Read full review
58
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
The hearty performances are undone by the forced eccentricity of the sets, the clothes, the music and, especially, the characters. The film is ugly and facile and childish in its love of its own naughtiness. Only Jill Clayburgh, as a creepy woman in whose home Augusten must live, feels human. The rest is no more real than a "Simpsons" episode -- and offers fewer laughs. Read full review
50
VarietyJustin Chang
Writer-director Ryan Murphy strives mightily to capture the bracing hilarity, pathos and surreal incident of Burroughs' bestselling memoir, but this rudderless adaptation never gets a firm grip on the author's deadpan tone or episodic narrative style. Read full review
50
Entertainment WeeklyLisa Schwarzbaum
Watching Running With Scissors the movie instead of reading Running With Scissors the best-selling memoir by Augusten Burroughs is like running with a spatula, or maybe some weird toast tongs. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoanne Kaufman
Ms. Bening takes her part and acts it all over the place, while Ms. Paltrow and Ms. Wood do their best theater of the absurd. It is left to Ms. Clayburgh, in a performance free of vanity and artifice, to find the movie's heart.
50
USA TodayClaudia Puig
Running With Scissors lacks the edge of Augusten Burroughs' best-selling memoir. The result is an inconsistent tragicomedy that attempts to be cut from the same darkly humorous cloth as "American Beauty," but fails. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleRuthe Stein
A wildly erratic, often annoying but never boring endeavor. Read full review
50
SalonStephanie Zacharek
Baldwin brings so much lumbering weariness to his role that we can't help feeling something for his character Read full review
50
Film ThreatPete Vonder Haar
Murphy doesn't have much of a handle on juggling laughs with pathos, and this makes some of the more touching scenes unintentionally amusing. The film, like Augusten's life, is uneven but not without its charms. Read full review
50
Miami HeraldConnie Ogle
While the attentive art direction of Running With Scissors pays scrupulous and imaginative attention to period detail, the film overlooks its greatest asset: Burroughs. Read full review
50
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
Alas, something happened on the book-to-screen operating table: Yes, Running With Scissors is rich, twisted, insane, mordant and ridiculous, but it is not funny. Not at all. Read full review
42
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam Arnold
In the end, there's also something distinctly distasteful about a movie in which the central figure casts himself as noble martyr while character-assassinating his parents. Read full review
40
L.A. WeeklyElla Taylor
One expects neither subtlety nor surprise from a scenario boasting a household pet named Freud. If there's any reason at all to see Running With Scissors, it' Bening. Read full review
40
Los Angeles TimesCarina Chocano
Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
I'm not entirely sure, but near as I can tell, this adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' memoir of family dysfunction finally and irrevocably lost me right about where the cat ended up in the stew pot, stirred with maniacally morose glee by Paltrow. Read full review
40
EmpireWill Lawrence
Well-acted by the superb ensemble cast but there just isn't a likeable character amongst them to care about. Read full review
38
PremiereGlenn Kenny
For the most part, Murphy is pitching somewhere between "American Beauty" and "The Royal Tenenbaums"; indeed, the characters Bening and Gwyneth Paltrow play in Scissors are, in a sense, inversions of their roles in Beauty and Tenenbaums, respectively. Read full review
30
Chicago ReaderJonathan Rosenbaum
Murphy seems either incapable of or uninterested in creating a recognizable world, so local comic effects count for everything. Read full review
25
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
Laughing at the freaks and then feeling bad about it is the sole reason for the existence of this pale little film. Read full review
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