Awash with sentimentality, this meandering tale falls way short of Crowe's usual standards.
Comment
04/22/08
Elizabethtown (2005)
28 %
Reviews Counted: 159 Fresh: 44 Rotten:115 Average Rating: 4.6/10
Consensus:
This story of a floundering shoe designer who returns home for a family tragedy gets lost in undeveloped plot lines and lackluster performances.
Runtime: 2 hrs 3 mins
Synopsis: Though it revolves around death, Cameron Crowe's hotly anticipated follow-up to VANILLA SKY is optimistic overall, beaming with the same life-affirming mood as the crowd-pleasers JERRY MAGUIRE and ALMOST FAMOUS. Promising young shoe-designer Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) quickly... [More]
Genre: Romance, Theatrical Release
Starring: Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Jessica Biel
Reviews
Top Critic
The entire enterprise smacks of wish-fulfilment provoked by middle-age male guilt. Uplifting, it most certainly ain’t.
06/24/06
Top Critic
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.
02/01/06
Top Critic
It's the too-cute contrivances on which the story is built that mean it's always teetering on the verge of collapse.
10/25/05
Top Critic
The hero's nuclear family and kooky rural relatives are so sketchily conceived that none of the intended comedy works, and the balance of the movie is given over to one of Crowe's sugary romances.
04/22/08
A meandering mood piece, with no tension, no chemistry, no character development, no plot and no point.
05/28/07
Crowe's capable of much better than this; let's hope he gets back on track with the next one.
01/11/07
The performances are solid . . . but it's Kentucky that really steals the show. Crowe paints the eccentricity of the locals with an affectionate brush.
09/22/06
Embaraçosamente infantil, o filme ainda deixa claro que, além da falta de carisma, Bloom é um ator inexpressivo que não possui o menor timing cômico.
04/08/06
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01/17/06
30 seconds in, it lost me. 3 minutes in, it angered me. 13 minutes in, I wanted to start randomly garotting people in the next row. 23 minutes in, I actually tried to.
01/10/06
With Elizabethtown [Crowe] has made another heartfelt movie shot through with his sensibility. He's also made a gigantic mess, the first directorial misfire in his six-film oeuvre.
12/09/05
I was surprised to find myself strolling along the film’s basic plotline, not necessarily bowled over by what I was seeing, but not exactly disliking it either.
12/09/05
Crowe has some very good ideas here, many of them interesting and funny, but the story lacks cohesion, focus, and contains one too many scenes that simply fall flat.
11/13/05
If, as the film suggests, true greatness is defined by the willingness to fail, fail big and still stick around afterwards, then consider Elizabethtown a sweet, melancholy paean to that sad truth.
11/10/05
Elizabethtown is rather like an OK mix tape - waves of poignance, whimsy, interrupted by a forced anomaly, & then charm in the next track.
11/09/05
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