For hours and days after you've seen it, you'll still be putting it together in your head. While all of it is gripping, it doesn't come together until the final scene, which is jolting, transcendent, unexpected yet inevitable.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 23, 2014

As long as the movie refuses to commit itself, it is a truly creepy, nerve-jangling experience.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 23, 2014

In the best puzzle movies, the pieces fit -- eventually. But if you try to piece together Jacob's Ladder, all you get for your trouble is more pieces.

| Aug 23, 2014

Without a strongly sympathetic figure at the center of the movie, Jacob's plight seems very remote. Watching this film should feel like being caught in a nightmare, but it feels more like watching someone else who is caught in a nightmare.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 23, 2014

One of Robbins' finest unheralded performances, plus a slew of supporting roles from then-unknowns Eriq LaSalle, Ving Rhames, Jason Alexander, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and an uncredited Macaulay Culkin.

| Aug 23, 2014

[Robbins' and Pena's] scenes together are the highlight of the film, so natural, so bright. That's why we're willing to invest a lot of time in what turns out to be a terribly overwrought plot.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 23, 2014

There's a word for a movie that dresses up the usual cheap tricks with real human suffering and a bogus patina of truth: offensive.

Full Review | Aug 23, 2014

A friend, after seeing Jacob's Ladder, griped, "I wasn't afraid of dying -- until I saw this movie." Put that blurb in an ad and see who shows up at the multiplexes.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 23, 2014

Jacob's Ladder is the nightmare as Rube Goldberg machine. Lyne bombards us with omens and portents, but they aren't rooted in anything, and so the audience remains in a state of arbitrary, floating anxiety.

| Original Score: C- | Sep 7, 2011

Despite all the confusion, it's a simple case of the script being too ambitious. It may emulate a man experiencing flashbacks, but it doesn't help the audience.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 27, 2009

A bold, powerful psychological horror film.

| Mar 27, 2009

Dull, unimaginative and pretentious.

| Jun 19, 2008

Lyne's giddying, unsettling direction conjures up moments of horrifying hallucinogenic power from the bad-trip hell of his protagonist.

| Jun 24, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 16, 2004

A slick, riveting, viscerally scary film about what in other hands would be a decidedly unsalable subject, namely death.

Full Review | May 20, 2003

[Falls] ultimately flat on its surrealistic face, the victim of too many fake-art sequences.

| Jan 1, 2000

This movie was not a pleasant experience, but it was exhilarating in the sense that I was able to observe filmmakers working at the edge of their abilities and inspirations.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Admittedly it is sporadic and at times even rambling, but when it succeeds ... the results are positively haunting.

| Jan 1, 2000

Lyne indulges more in misdirection than in direction; he's a magician turning a sleazy trick.

| Jan 1, 2000