Cake wants to be edgy and genuine, to expose raw and visceral feelings. But it keeps from mining the most searing dramatic soil because, given the nature of the tragedy which it orbits, confronting them head-on may prove uncomfortable to audiences.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 4, 2022

Raw, painful and utterly absorbing, Cake is a powerful and moving study of women truly on the verge.

| Oct 7, 2021

Jennifer Aniston is so nakedly viscerally vulnerable in Cake it hurts. This is her moment.

| Oct 7, 2021

Driven by Aniston's well-judged balance of intensity and restraint, it's an affecting film.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 27, 2021

A great showcase for the new, dramatic Aniston but it isn't a great film. In it's final moments the movie grasps for a feel good ending which is just slightly out of reach.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2021

Cake is lacking any of the flavor that would be needed to make this film sweet. The weak screenplay only gives us a sliver of our characters. What we want is an entire piece.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 31, 2021

It's refreshing to see the talented actress working outside the studio system in a performance that stands out as one of her best to date. Unfortunately, the rest of the film feels like one big, bland pity-party.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 18, 2019

Cake is an emotionally moving film carried by Aniston's sharp performance; however its shallow treatment of relationships means it fails to be more than the sum of its parts.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 16, 2019

Cake is mostly a melancholy, tragically stunning film, with a groundbreaking performance by Aniston and enough biting humor and heart to create the perfect balance it needs to make a lasting impression.

| Original Score: A | May 10, 2019

Aniston's performance is the essential ingredient that makes the film worth watching even as other elements prove half-baked.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Apr 18, 2019

Barnz's Cake could have been an intriguing look into the world of chronic pain and depression, but trying to be a jack-of-all-trades ruined the film and left it a master of none.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 4, 2019

The reason the process isn't compelling is because it's a bridge to nowhere; Cake is monotonous, rudderless, and doesn't make any real statements about depression, suicide, or the act of grieving.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 19, 2019

Cake is well a little plain without icing and this film lacked the icing.

| Aug 21, 2018

Aniston isn't brilliant because she managed not to wear make-up or not to wash her hair. She is brilliant because with every inch of her body she conveys pain. She's creepy, rigid, a plotline -- as a recovering invalid -- in her own right.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 15, 2018

Aniston can't find within herself sufficient emotional colours to shade our response to one of life's victims who may have in some way contributed to her cavalcade of ills.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 20, 2017

Aniston gives a good performance, but she's photographed like a star from Old Hollywood, where glamour always trumped character.

| Oct 17, 2017

Submerged in her character's physical limitations and mental anguish, Aniston gets it right whether grimacing in pain or recoiling in anger and if Meryl Streep, Hilary Swank or Julia Roberts had played the part, I know they'd be up for an Oscar.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 18, 2017

Cake is a particular disappointment, though the blame cannot entirely be assigned to Jennifer Aniston.

| Aug 3, 2017

Aniston's Claire takes a claustrophobic emotional journey that's at once too neat and too cute.

| Apr 26, 2017

It will be a pity if viewers are too put off by the subject to see Aniston's bravura turn, a tour de force that also tells us something about what we can and can't accept in women's performances, our threshold for unlikability and unprettiness.

| Feb 15, 2017