Cloverfield is tiresome, dumb and horrid, and just in case you didn't get that I'll say it again: this film is tiresome, dumb and horrid. Don't go.

| Aug 23, 2018

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 18, 2011

For gasps and thrills and movie monster mayhem, the film is a success. It's not flawless, but if you shove that aside, I guarantee you that you will have a gas at the theater.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Aug 14, 2009

... exciting, terrifying and breathlessly entertaining.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 1, 2008

It's like Abrams and crew have looked into the void and thought: the only thing worse than Armageddon is if no one witnessing it is hot.

| Original Score: C- | Jan 29, 2008

A dazzling experiment that paid off immensely, this is cinematic pleasure at its purest.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 22, 2008

The mechanism is the message in Cloverfield, a movie so aluminum-sleek, ultra-portable, and itsy-bitsy sexy, it's amazing Steve Jobs didn't pull it out of an envelope at Macworld.

| Jan 22, 2008

I had a lot of fun with this inside-out take on the monster movie.

Full Review | Jan 22, 2008

Under the modern flummery, behind the faux amateurism and the handheld shudder, Cloverfield is a vastly old-fashioned piece of work, creaking with hilarious contrivance.

| Jan 22, 2008

The fleeting, incomplete glimpses of the monster early on prove the old dictum of B-movie auteur Val Lewton that a momentary image can have greater impact than a prolonged one.

| Jan 22, 2008

Maybe we now live in a world where we record the moment first and feel it later. If that's the case, Cloverfield leaves us waiting to feel.

Full Review | Jan 18, 2008

Smartly reconjures the 1950s monster movie for the digital age.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 18, 2008

It's a giant-monster movie from the point of view of some of those little people running and shrieking in the street -- and it works incredibly well.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 18, 2008

The running and climbing, the tidal waves of debris rushing down the avenues, the screams and carnage grow tiresome.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 18, 2008

It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jan 18, 2008

We've sat through that kind of movie again and again, but we've never sat through anything with Cloverfield's subjective sting. You'd have to be tougher than I was not to be blown sideways by it.

Full Review | Jan 18, 2008

An efficiently gripping sci-fi/horror romp.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 18, 2008

Cloverfield is visceral attack that it leaves the viewer reeling for details that flew by like so many bricks raining off broken buildings.

| Original Score: B | Jan 18, 2008

Fully visceral, visually impressive.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 18, 2008

A remarkably economical, street-level view of widespread panic caused by an abomination that gets, and ultimately needs, no explanation.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 18, 2008