The film’s anarchy might reflect a lot of younger players’ first experience with Minecraft, where destruction can be just as fun as creation. Missing on the big screen, meanwhile, is the odd, remote atmosphere that drew me in.

| Apr 15, 2025

“A Minecraft Movie” is quirky and goofy enough to make one wish it held together better overall, but it’s also a likable venture.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 14, 2025

Jack Black and Jason Momoa together, they're okay; so it's perfectly unremarkable.

| Apr 11, 2025

It’s got enough personality to make me wish that Hess had had a still freer hand... Don’t mistake my curiosity for enthusiasm. I can’t recommend that anyone see A Minecraft Movie, not even a child.

| Apr 11, 2025

Jared Hess directed Napoleon Dynamite. This movie is as if Napoleon Dynamite directed it, not Jared.

| Apr 9, 2025

For a wildly imaginative world-building project, the film is mostly ghastly to look at... if the possibilities of this world are endless, why does it all devolve into violent, ugly, boring warfare?

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 8, 2025

It feels like a small miracle that the resulting film is so funny, lively, and light on its feet.

| Apr 7, 2025

A Minecraft Movie feigns creativity by hollowing out a name brand and inserting a zombified story that does little more than capitalize on (or cannibalize) the name.

| Apr 7, 2025

The villain, a piglin called Malgosha who hates creativity and is obsessed with hoarding wealth, provides an inadvertently neat allegory for the studio bosses who greenlit this egregious IP cash-in.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 7, 2025

A hyperactive hot-pink mess of a movie, which fails to elevate its cubic source material and revels in that failure like it’s achieving something.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 5, 2025

Mr. Hess and his five screenwriters have mined childhood to craft something that’s alive with imagination. It’s not the most polished movie you’ll see this year, but it’s as cheerfully mad as a little kid’s birthday party. We could use more of that.

| Apr 5, 2025

There’s some quirky visual invention here, but it soon devolves into a mess of explosions, pratfalls and creaky innuendo.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 5, 2025

What makes A Minecraft Movie so dispiriting is how it fails to spark the imagination, betraying a core tenet of the game on which it’s based

| Apr 4, 2025

It seems as if there’s either a gag or a virtue-signalling lesson in there about Garrett being simultaneously super-tough and super-soft, but like everything else in this phenomenally lazy movie, the will to execute a coherent idea simply isn’t there.

| Original Score: 0/5 | Apr 4, 2025

There’s a self-reflexivity to the game’s artifact-y textures that’s lost in this film adaptation, where the finely detailed look of just about everything says nothing in itself about the endless possibilities of a digital world’s malleability.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 4, 2025

The comic pairing of Jack Black and Jason Momoa makes this video game-turned-PG-movie pablum seem better than the cash grab it is. But not by much. Still, there’s no shame in being strictly kids’ stuff that knows how to serve and entertain its audience.

| Apr 4, 2025

While it may not be a masterpiece, its sheer sense of fun make it an easy win for families looking for something to watch during the holidays.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 4, 2025

Another example of Hollywood shoving a beloved property into the factory mold (cube-shaped mold, natch), hoping name recognition will be enough to justify its existence.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Apr 4, 2025

Turning Minecraft into a movie presents a challenge, because the film has a lot of character development to catch up on. But, as The Lego Movie and Barbie have demonstrated, it's possible to get it spectacularly right.

| Apr 3, 2025

We just don’t want to be the one to inform God what his creations hath wrought with this expensively cheap, 100-percent corporate mess.

| Apr 3, 2025