The Royal Tenenbaums Critic Reviews

Anderson offers no phony uplift for the Tenenbaums or for audiences. But he does know how to take a sad song and make it better. In these troubled times, that's a gift.Read the full review

Exists on a knife edge between comedy and sadness. There are big laughs, and then quiet moments when we're touched.Read the full review

This is not a movie that wraps up its story in a tidy bow, but it's a lot more fun than most of the ones that do.Read the full review

Underachieves in its own way by trapping an expansive, probing story in a brittle, highly artificial style that constricts character and emotional development.Read the full review

It's a B+, not an A. This would be enough for most filmmakers. But Anderson must contend with a higher standard. It's his fault for being original.Read the full review

Hackman gives the con-man lines a simple, straight-ahead urgency that makes the man first hilarious and then, as the pleasures of human company are withdrawn and his resentment begins to bubble up, inexplicably touching. This is a great performance.Read the full review

Might have been about the rise and fall of a family of gifted children. That would have been the typical way to approach the story. Instead, it's something rare -- a movie about people who have already fallen, whose best days are behind them.Read the full review

At once endearing and unbearably show-offy, it seems to be the product of a sensibility formed by age-inappropriate reading.Read the full review

There are laughs in it. But mostly you sit around waiting for it to be funnier, or at least funny more often. The problem is that it hasn't figured out a way to be funny while satisfyingly accommodating the pain in these characters.Read the full review