It would be excessively generous to call Cry-Baby a satire, but its parody of what enchanted and excited teenagers more than 30 years ago is energetically delivered by Waters and the enthusiastic cast.

| Dec 13, 2024

The overall tone may be comedic, but Waters wants the romance to be real, which is ultimately what makes Cry-Baby work so well.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 3, 2024

As usual, Waters turns his nose (and middle finger) up at decent, square society, preferring instead to frolic with the freaks, geeks, and outcasts.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 9, 2024

Packed with catchy musical numbers, John Waters’s Cry-Baby is a riotous satire of ’50s teen idol and JD films that still has something to say about class in America.

| Jun 7, 2024

The lite teen comedy was too silly, too mild, and too trivial to make an impact.

| Original Score: C+ | Jun 3, 2024

Cry Baby gives a new meaning to the word, overwhelming. [Full review in Spanish]

| Nov 11, 2022

In fact, the movie is so good- humored that it stands in marked contrast to almost every other mainstream American film out now...

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 12, 2022

It's not Waters' most revolutionary or provocative work, but Cry-Baby effectively pokes fun at the sanitized Greases and Romeo and Juliets of the world for the queerdos and freaks alike

| Jun 23, 2021

It's not at all difficult to declare Cry-Baby the best American movie musical in recent memory.

| May 21, 2020

For a while the actors seem intimidated by the '50s references, but the film eventually develops a musical energy that carries the day.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 21, 2015

Cry-Baby is often sweet-spirited even when its crummy, but there's also something fetid in its foolery.

| Jan 21, 2015

If Cry-Baby has a message, it's that Cry-Baby and Allison deserve each other because they're young and they're beautiful, which certainly runs counter to Waters' affection for the grotesque, the bad and the ugly.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 21, 2015

The wizard of odd still runs amok.

| Jan 21, 2015

It all adds up to zany, wide-eyed, quintessential Waters havoc -- the "kinder, gentler" 1990s brand, perhaps. But the genuine article, nonetheless.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 21, 2015

I don't quite know how Waters did it (and I have absolutely no idea why he did it), but the fact that Cry-Baby is fun suggests that the filmmaker possesses an instinctive understanding of what made those Elvis pictures so successful in the first place.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 21, 2015

Waters's feeling for the mid-50s doesn't really match his sense of the early 60s, and his plot moves seem increasingly formulaic.

| Jan 21, 2015

The nostalgic delights in Waters's reform school drool are often more subtle than his other period offering, Hairspray, but it's still a polished debunking of pop culture from the "Pope of Trash".

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 21, 2015

Waters's writing is woefully uneven. It's as if Sam Kinison had decided to tell knock-knock jokes -- sterile, unfunny knock-knock jokes at that.

| Jan 21, 2015

As Waters moves to a more conventional type of satire, he is losing some of the edge that gave his earlier films their crass appeal.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 21, 2015

John Waters progressed from the truly disgusting ("Pink Flamingoes") to the truly funny ("Hair Spray") only to now hit the mainstream wall.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 21, 2015