Spring Breakers
A24 | Release Date: March 15, 2013 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
63
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 40 Critic Reviews
Positive:
26
Mixed:
9
Negative:
5
Watch Now
Buy on
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Expand

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The New York TimesManohla DargisMar 14, 2013
In Spring Breakers [Mr. Korine] bores into a contested, deeply American topic — the pursuit of happiness taken to nihilistic extremes — but turns his exploration into such a gonzo, outrageously funny party that it takes a while to appreciate that this is more of a horror film than a comedy. Read full review
100
Village VoiceScott FoundasMar 12, 2013
Spring Breakers seems to be holding a funhouse mirror up to the face of youth-driven pop culture, leaving us uncertain whether to laugh, recoil in horror, or marvel at its strange beauty. All I knew is I couldn't wait to see it a second time. Read full review
91
IndieWireEric KohnMar 26, 2013
Atmospherically, Spring Breakers is an elegant evocation of noir storytelling, littered with misdeeds with girls and guns at every turn. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanMar 13, 2013
Harmony Korine's first ''mainstream'' movie, Spring Breakers, is by far the best thing he's ever done. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy BurrMar 21, 2013
Korine wants to give us a portrait of our nation’s children — the girls, especially — as beautifully depraved sharks, pleasure-seeking killers oblivious to the comedy and horror of their existence. And damned if he doesn’t pull it off, or come close enough. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperMar 18, 2013
A candy-colored fever dream is the most unforgettable movie of the year so far. Read full review
83
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallMar 20, 2013
Tampa Bay wears fringe nihilism well, including wet-fever dreams of trigger-happy angels floating on cannabis clouds and dusted with cocaine like beignets waiting to be licked clean. Or drug gangstas sporting cornrows and gold-grill teeth, living large and thinking three-ways. Film as a fetish tool, that's what Spring Breakers is all about, y'all. Read full review
80
EmpireSimon CrookApr 1, 2013
A lurid, luminous teen-bender movie, as ludicrous as it is stylish, and Harmony Korine’s best film in years. Read full review
80
Total FilmRosie FletcherMar 20, 2013
Brave, brash and exhilarating, but lacking the insight and impact of the Korine-scripted "Kids" (1995). Too much fun for social commentary, this is what you wish school was like. Read full review
80
Time OutJoshua RothkopfMar 12, 2013
Spring Breakers is either an inspired satire of the youth movie or the most irresponsible comedy mainstream Hollywood will never make. The bros in your crowd will call it rad — and radical it is. Read full review
80
The GuardianXan BrooksFeb 19, 2013
Full credit to Korine, who sustains this act of creative vandalism right through to the finish. Spring Breakers unfolds as a fever dream of teenage kicks, a high-concept heist movie with mescal in the fuel tank. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenMar 20, 2013
Spring Breakers is Korine’s most cogent take yet on society’s outsiders. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick GroenMar 28, 2013
Whether the film is uniquely brilliant or dismissively dumb is not the issue here. Either choice can (and will) be offered – it’s the choosing that counts. Read full review
75
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezMar 25, 2013
The movie is wild, but not in the ways that you expect, and it’s also surprisingly chaste — you think you see a lot more than you actually do. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChroniclePeter HartlaubMar 21, 2013
The female actors, particularly Hudgens and Ashley Benson, are game for the ride. And Franco is indispensable, bringing humor and pathos to one of the more repulsive cinematic creations in recent memory. Read full review
75
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsMar 21, 2013
With a greater emphasis on sex than violence, Spring Breakers is a more enjoyable guilty pleasure than “Natural Born Killers” and just as acute about our cultural devolution. For all its seeming stupidity, its masterstroke is making us complicit in the corruption of its young stars (who include the director’s own wife). Read full review
75
Portland OregonianMarc MohanMar 21, 2013
It's a pleasure, so soon after seeing Franco's recent bewildered performance in "Oz the Great and Powerful," to watch him tackle this menacing yet beguiling character. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliMar 21, 2013
The equation of "drugs+booze+sex=happy ending" applies. Then along comes Harmony Korine with Spring Breakers and subverts an entire genre. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsMar 21, 2013
Starts out like a salacious, rump-centric and blithely bare-breasted hip-hop video and ends up in the realm of scary and inspired trash. That's not meant negatively. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineMar 12, 2013
One of the effects of Harmony Korine's feverish, hypnotic style is that the whole thing feels like a fantasy—or rather a nightmare perversion of the American dream. Read full review
75
The PlaylistOliver LytteltonFeb 19, 2013
Midnight movie programmers of the future will undoubtedly give it a long life years after it’s gone from first-run theaters. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzMar 20, 2013
What stays with you is Franco, one of the more enigmatic actors around, going way over the top yet grounding his performance in … something. Whatever it is, it’s more interesting than all the wet T-shirt contests in the world, and it makes Spring Breakers worth watching. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleMar 14, 2013
The movie is an arty lark of ambiguous entertainment value, pulsing with melancholy. It's rarely less than interesting visually or tonally, thanks in large part to Korine's prurient sense of humor and the rich location textures and Crayola sweep provided by gifted cinematographer Benoit Debie ("Enter the Void"). Read full review
67
Film.comJordan HoffmanMar 3, 2013
It’s shallow, it’s boring, it’s poignant, it’s clever, it’s poorly acted, it’s intentionally poorly acted, it has no story, it has marvelous scenes, it is artful, it is hallucinatory, it is shoddily put together. All response is valid. Read full review
63
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreMar 16, 2013
Spring Break – it’s every bit as much fun as you think it is. Until it isn’t. Read full review
63
Rolling StonePeter TraversMar 14, 2013
As Alien, a gun-crazy Florida drug dealer with tats, beaded cornrows and a grill any rapper would envy, Franco is a bug-f--k blast. Too bad the movie itself is rarely as outrageous as he is. Read full review
60
NPRStephanie ZacharekMar 21, 2013
Although parts of Spring Breakers are very funny, there's also something tsk-tsking and superior about it, as if Korine had thought a lot about young middle America's idea of midsemester fun and decided he doesn't like it one tiny bit. Read full review
60
The New YorkerAnthony LaneMar 20, 2013
Who will stay with this film, and glorify it? Two sorts, I reckon: real revellers, randy for sensation, out of their heads; and, a block away, coffee-drinking Ph.D.s, musing on the cinema of alienation, too lost inside their heads to break for spring. [25 March 2013, p.108]
60
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierMar 14, 2013
So often not in his element — his turn in “Oz the Great and Powerful” is evidence of that — Franco is in freako mode here, and walks a line between spaced-out caricature and just plain Out There. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubScott TobiasMar 13, 2013
The overall effect is enervating, like a party that grinds on after most of the attendees have either left or passed out. And much like "Kids," the enfant terrible’s breakthrough screenplay, Korine’s film has an unintended moral hysteria, like a warning to parents of what their good girls are doing when they aren’t looking. The message: Keep them locked up. In their bikinis, if necessary. Read full review
50
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaMar 21, 2013
Am I crazy, or are Spring Breakers and "Oz the Great and Powerful" essentially the same movie? James Franco stars in both - a tattooed, gun-totin' gangsta in one, a charlatan magician in the other (you figure out which is which), and, in both, he's encircled by a bevy of Hollywood babes determined either to get witchy on him, or get that other witchy-rhyming word on him. Read full review
50
USA TodayClaudia PuigMar 20, 2013
With director Harmony Korine's visual overload and somnolent voice-overs — the same sentences are repeated ad nauseum — it manages to be both mind-numbingly dull and off-putting. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinMar 20, 2013
Spring Breakers strikes me as another of Korine’s calculated punk outrages, a sploog in Disney’s direction. Read full review
40
VarietyGuy LodgeFeb 19, 2013
Just about every charge of social negligence leveled at Spring Breakers can be countered with an arch claim of intent, which makes it at once playful and wearying; enjoyment is contingent on how little you're willing to fight it. Read full review
40
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyFeb 19, 2013
It has hypnotic visual style and a dense, driving soundscape. But it’s also too monotonous and thematically empty to be seriously provocative. Read full review
38
New York PostLou LumenickMar 14, 2013
Admittedly, I’m far from a fan of Korine’s “Gummo,’’ “Julien Donkey-Boy’’ and the absymal “Trash Humpers.’’ But that he is proud of making intentionally sloppy and tedious movies doesn’t make them any easier to watch. Or all that much fun, for that matter. Read full review
30
SlateDana StevensMar 20, 2013
Any irregularity in tone becomes a part of the movie’s intentionally rough, imperfect surface — a formal strategy I might find interesting if I could make head or tail of what the movie that’s using it is trying to say. Read full review
30
SalonAndrew O'HehirMar 14, 2013
Fitzgerald’s influence could have crept in there by osmosis, and whatever other charges you want to level against Spring Breakers – such as incoherence, plotlessness, salaciousness and mind-numbing monotony – it has no lack of high concept. Read full review
30
TimeRichard CorlissFeb 19, 2013
"Trash Humpers" at least had the artistic courage of its own lunatic convictions, but Spring Breakers is all surface and sham; it’s trash about humpers. Read full review
12
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanMar 22, 2013
How on earth is it possible for one film to be so tiresome? Spring Breakers isn’t deadly dull despite all the nudity and violence, but because of it. Read full review
More From This Movie

63 Critic Reviews

5.9 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