While it would be nice to be able to laugh a little more (acoustic-guitar versions of David Bowie classics sung in Portuguese only go so far), the film delivers a metaphor for the death of romantic and robust boyhood imagination with great subtlety.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 9, 2023

While most Anderson detractors point to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as why they don’t like the filmmaker, even arguably his weakest film is still pretty outstanding.

| Jun 28, 2023

It may be impossible to love The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, but it's remarkably easy to drown in its sea of eccentricity.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 8, 2023

The production design of the ship is impressive and the cinematography by Robert Yeoman is full of whimsy but none of that matters if the story isn’t interesting.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Jul 21, 2022

The resulting film is as much an exploration of fading youth and mortality as it is a dazzling dive into the wonders of the ocean.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 8, 2022

The Life Aquatic deals more skilfully in majestic moments than human drama, though, and it's these that will stick with you.

| Apr 28, 2021

Anderson's film is not an entirely successful effort, but there is something liberating and deeply affecting about his method of work and that of his collaborators.

| Mar 5, 2021

It's hard to fault Anderson for striving - with clearly considerable effort - to create a film world more complete and satisfying than the real one.

| Feb 3, 2020

This is Murray and Anderson at their most irreproachable and beguiling. In short, it's a bit of a minor masterpiece.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 24, 2019

And spending time in the company of Murray, the deadpan brilliant humanist clown and his washed-up but still-seeking sea explorer, is an existential hoot.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 1, 2019

For the first time Anderson is distancing us as much as he's charming us. What's charming, though, ensures Life Aquatic is no failure.

| Apr 1, 2019

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, lacks heart, offering up in its place an aquamarine world sinking due to a near-terminal case of whimsy.

| Apr 1, 2019

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is so knowing and so arch: the first part striving for a faux-grandiosity that the second part tries to undercut by its pseudo-geekiness... but ends up being plain annoying.

| Apr 1, 2019

How much of this will work for you depends on your appetite for the picturesquely dysfunctional.

| Apr 1, 2019

It is such a brilliant idea, and everything looks so great, especially the way the film is constructed on Cousteau-esque lines, with the calm deliberation of a nature documentary from a more innocent age.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2019

Seems to stagnate. [Full review in Spanish]

| Apr 1, 2019

All the stylized performances in stylized sets work to kill the film's emotional content. It's not that we don't like the characters; it's that Anderson won't let us get involved with them, a fatal flaw in something this strenuously whimsical.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2019

A deliberate and irritating absence of dramatic momentum is accompanied by delicious, often magical, moments.

| Apr 1, 2019

Orson Welles said a film studio was the best train-set a boy could have, but The Life Aquatic is something else: Anderson uses the sound stages of Cinecittá like a kid playing with toy boats in the bath. He makes one hell of a splash.

| Apr 1, 2019

Anderson never manages the difficult art of switching from put-on to pathos. And even the straight-faced performances of Wilson and Blanchett don't help.

| Apr 1, 2019