Cloverfield Critic Reviews

The genre may be old news, but the skillfully made Cloverfield offers a heart-racing experience with plenty of chills, thrills and exhilaration.Read the full review

Despite a first reel entirely devoted to establishing characters, Cloverfield is basically a line-'em-up, pick-'em-off horror movie that's effective without being either viscerally frightening or emotionally moving. Watching it is like going through a car wash: You come out of it thoroughly Cloverfield-ized, but essentially unchanged.Read the full review

Cloverfield's gritty, in-your-face style is uncompromising. If you're looking for a nice, clean movie filmed with a steadycam, you'll have to look elsewhere.Read the full review

Cloverfield is a relentless, I-thought-my-eyeballs-were-bleeding exercise in visual disorientation.Read the full review

It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand.Read the full review

Adept at wringing maximum suspense and might have reached the heights of the Korean monster film "The Host" but for the limitations of the camcorder ploy. While it injects the film with a run-and-gun urgency, the device grows tiresome and ultimately leaves the film shortchanged.Read the full review

Cloverfield, a surreptitiously subversive, stylistically clever little gem of an entertainment disguised, under its deadpan-neutral title, as a dumb Gen-YouTube monster movie, makes the convincingly chilling argument that the world will end -- or, at least, Manhattan will crumble -- with a bang and a whimper.Read the full review

Like too many big-studio productions, Cloverfield works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt. Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.Read the full review

Think "Godzilla Unplugged" -- with chillingly effective results.Read the full review