Elizabethtown Critic Reviews

A mess of a movie -- but a warm, friendly mess that's hard not to like, even when it tests your patience.Read the full review

Though it's no fiasco -- there's nothing mythic about its disjointed story -- it is a failure.Read the full review

Elizabethtown is a long, lurching trip to nowhere in particular, but Elizabethtown is a place where you wouldn't mind spending some more time, though perhaps under different circumstances.Read the full review

For all sort of reasons, I was disappointed that there is barely anything of Bruce McGill as the family's hearty swindler. And there is too much of Sarandon, whose big scene--a speech at her late husband's memorial service, complete with jokes and a tap dance--is the movie's most egregious misfire.Read the full review

It's hard to believe the creative mind that gave us "Almost Famous," "Jerry Maguire," "Say Anything" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" looked up with satisfaction after typing 117 pages of this.Read the full review

What's sad is that Elizabethtown contains two GREAT sequences.Read the full review

A saga of static set pieces and strenuously clever notions, this is a fiasco of a film if ever there was one.Read the full review

Only a truly great director can make a film of high artistic merit, filled with personality and memorable scenes, that's still a borderline disaster. (Think One From The Heart or 1941.) So the heartfelt and woefully miscalculated Elizabethtown may be the film that marks Cameron Crowe's arrival as a truly great director.Read the full review

Although rich in screwball silliness and sharp one-liners, film lacks the narrative drive one finds in the classic comedies of Preston Sturges, Frank Capra and Billy Wilder, whom Crowe always seems to try to emulate.Read the full review