Rent is best enjoyed singing it loudly at the top of your lungs, dancing until you break a sweat, and the collapsing exhausted against your couch with your best friends.

| Mar 27, 2024

High hopes, flat results.

| Jan 17, 2018

Chris Columbus, who managed to suck the magic out of the first two Harry Potter films, does the same with this adaptation.

| Sep 26, 2017

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 7, 2006

The movie, directed without a personal stamp of any kind by Chris Columbus, is so slick that the grime comes from a spray can and the grungy bohemian costumes look rented from a Betsey Johnson boutique sale.

Full Review | Dec 21, 2005

It's real -- and, on screen, it's really cringe-worthy. Not quite Phantom of the Opera cringe-worthy, but not as much fun to blow raspberries at, either.

| Dec 8, 2005

This just might be the single most shockingly good movie I've seen all year, and with as underwhelming as much of this fall's more high profile flicks have been Rent couldn't have come at a better time.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 6, 2005

Rent, for all its feel-good desperation and plague-battered bonhomie, arrives in theatres with the curious but unmistakable air of an artifact from another time, even another world.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Constantly dragged down into mediocrity by Chris Columbus' dreary, rhythm-challenged direction.

| Original Score: C | Dec 6, 2005

"Rent" needed to be directed by a Martin Scorsese or a Spike Lee, a director with both a gift for gritty material and a confidence and familiarity with shooting New York City.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 30, 2005

The film captures the beautiful spirit and the raw energy of Larson's play, and it respects the wonderful, gorgeous, life-affirming music.

Full Review | Nov 29, 2005

A mediocre, unimaginative, inefficient filmmaker, Columbus delivers a Rent that isn't so much bad as perfunctory.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Nov 28, 2005

As directed by Columbus, Jonathan Larson's East Village reworking of 'La Boheme' in the age of AIDS retains its calisthenic pathos, as well as most of its original cast, but you'd have to be a real Rent-Head to envisage Academy Awards in its future.

| Original Score: B- | Nov 28, 2005

Director Chris Columbus has done what any smart filmmaker would do with a musical and let the songs dictate his movie.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 23, 2005

Most of the musical numbers aren't stylized (a natty tango number is an exception) but based in a Hollywood-gritty reality that at times feels silly.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 23, 2005

The scourge of rock-opera, a musical mutation that manages to combine the least savory elements of both with the advantages of neither.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 23, 2005

If nothing else, the movie reveals Jonathan Larson's musical to be an illuminating time capsule of a wild period immediately before and after the scourge of AIDS.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 23, 2005

In terms of its music and lyrics Rent flickers more than it flames.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 23, 2005

Rent takes to the streets of New York and convulses in song and dance for nearly two solid hours.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 23, 2005

The music and direction feel generic but the cast deserves credit for squeezing every possible drop of emotion out of the material.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 23, 2005