Both [Saoirse] Ronan and [Stanley] Tucci are worth the price of an admission ticket.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 16, 2019

It's an interesting way to tell a heartbreaking story a young girl whose life was taken away too soon, and whose family fights to pull the pieces together after their loss.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 12, 2017

| Original Score: C | Feb 18, 2012

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 18, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

The Lovely Bones does a fantastic job with revered, complex source material. As terrific on terra firma as it is audacious in its astral plane, it is doubtful we'll see a more imaginative, courageous film in 2010.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 19, 2010

Under the hammy direction of Peter Jackson The Lovely Bones has lost its poetic bone structure. What was a complex, quirky novel has been turned into a movie mishmash of Lord of the Rings and High School Musical, with a serial killer thrown in.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 19, 2010

Instead of a compelling nightmare, he has created a bland, girly-sparkly dream.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 19, 2010

It's an extraordinary folly. A turkey, a pig's ear, a mad cow of a film. Its treatment of bereavement and familial grief is crazier than anything Lars Von Trier came up with in Antichrist.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 19, 2010

The delicacy and finely-wrought characterisation of Alice Sebold's novel has been removed in favour of a beyond-the-grave whodunit, subtlety be damned.

Full Review | Feb 19, 2010

Jackson seems more at home in the afterlife than in this one, rendering this off-kilter project creepy and pretentious.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 19, 2010

Jackson's version achieves a different, less palatable kind of novelty. It is a "heart-warming" film about murder.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 19, 2010

It is the kind of film that falls over itself trying to dazzle us, and makes an unholy mess of the vital workaday stuff. It is silly, tedious, tasteless and utterly false.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 19, 2010

The most remarkable aspect of this is how rubbish the CGI effects are -I mean, this is Peter Jackson, for goodness' sake!

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 19, 2010

The imagery kills the fear. In a film which is essentially about a child serial killer, the constant blossoming of visual possibility leaves the reality of what happened to Susie both hidden and cold.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 19, 2010

You wanna know what purgatory feels like? Sit through all two-plus hours of this lurid mush and you'll have a fair idea.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 19, 2010

Alice Sebold's evocative best seller proves to be more unfilmable than Tolkien's sprawling fantasy trilogy - a disappointment, yet it's impossible for anyone to do it better

| Original Score: C | Feb 5, 2010

Some books should stay between their covers, and The Lovely Bones may well be one of them.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 15, 2010

Understand, the film still has power, just not as much as it should.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 15, 2010

The movie is often wise.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 15, 2010