Cocaine Bear will, in time, stand as a dated artifact of the current moment's vogue for viral animal videos and epic memes.

| Jun 8, 2023

This is a movie that makes no apologies for trying to make you howl in laughter and disgust – at the same time.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 4, 2023

Save yourself the price of admission and just watch the trailer if you haven’t already, or—better yet—make your own TikTok version. It’ll be funnier and will cost viewers a lot less time.

| Mar 3, 2023

Why does the bear kill everyone it meets during its drug rampage except for the one person it decides to kidnap? Why don’t people with guns shoot the bear when they have the chance? Because the movie needs to happen, that’s why!

| Original Score: 0/5 | Mar 3, 2023

French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard allegedly said that all you needed for a good movie was “a girl and a gun.” If the movie is called “Cocaine Bear,” all you need is yayo and a clone of Yogi.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 3, 2023

[It] acts like it’s above the clichés it’s stringing together.

| Mar 2, 2023

The film is well made, efficient, clever, and some of its funny lines will have you, um, snorting. But in the end, it’s still about a bear on a coke binge.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 2, 2023

Cocaine Bear is a success...by putting the emphasis on a handful of extremely gnarly kills and sprinkling in just enough weirdness to keep the entire train moving.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 2, 2023

Elizabeth Banks takes this real-life curio and slams it up against the “killer animal” genre with mostly pleasing results.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 27, 2023

It may not be Grizzly Man meets Scarface, but it leaves Snakes on a Plane standing on the runway.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 26, 2023

In an atmosphere in which it is all too easy to feel suffocated by climate anxiety, Elizabeth Banks’ film cuts through our ecological malaise.

| Feb 25, 2023

This is certainly a different film. As edgy as it is, it could have been edgier, and the plot sags a little towards the end. But with the latest Ant-Man topping the box office, it wins points just for being different.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 25, 2023

Cocaine Bear could’ve been a triumph if the jokes landed, but the zingers just aren’t up to the mayhem. And though the character actors are all capable of sterling work, there’s nobody to root for here.

| Feb 25, 2023

The pleasure’s in the crass, goopy excitement of it. It’s kind of a put-on, but the movie gets by on being surprisingly blood-soaked where it counts.

| Feb 25, 2023

This is a rare film that extracts humour from younger teenagers shovelling down cocaine on penknives, but elsewhere the tone is closer to something produced by Steven Spielberg.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 24, 2023

The primary sin of Cocaine Bear... is its complete inability to balance the film’s twin directives of broad comedy and shock horror.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Feb 24, 2023

While “Cocaine Bear” mostly succeeds at the task, it’s still low-end comedy-horror schlock, no more and no less.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 24, 2023

In every dumb and delightful way, it's just about a bear, standing in front of the world, asking for more cocaine till she explodes.

| Original Score: C+ | Feb 24, 2023

Cocaine Bear is just as good as it needs to be. If it were any better, it probably couldn’t call itself Cocaine Bear.

| Feb 24, 2023

Many of the set pieces in director Elizabeth Banks' one-joke film are shocking because they are so boring. This film promises laughs and scares but manages to deliver neither.

| Feb 24, 2023