Making a great film that's a psychedelic, kung-fu-inspired meditation on the human condition is a tall order. The Matrix delivers on all that & more.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 27, 2024

“The Matrix” is the AI prophecy and wake-up call the human race is in dire need of. Watching the 2024 re-release is highly recommended.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 25, 2024

An amazing cocktail of martial arts, shootouts, philosophy, romance, fantasy, revolutionary visual effects and perfect casting. “The Matrix” surprised us 25 years ago, and it continues to surprise us in the Year of Our Lord 2024. Full review in Spanish.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 21, 2024

The Wachowskis proceed to turn the world as we know it into a virtual reality landscape with a 20th century tech-noir look (lit with a sickly green hue, like the glow of an old IBM computer screen) and the physics of a video game.

| Sep 9, 2023

A $60 million, high-tech assault on the senses and a pretentious insult to the mind.

| Jul 15, 2023

A cyberpunk thriller that's so much fun to watch, it could single-handedly reboot the genre.

| Jul 13, 2023

The Wachowskis seem to be saying that while state-of-the-art effects speak for themselves, loud and clear, there's still room amid all the kicking and shooting and shouting for the carefully observed human emotion.

| Jul 13, 2023

Though The Matrix ultimately overdoses on gloom-and-doom grunge, over-elaborate cool and especially running time, it's just clever enough to enable [the Wachowskis] to nix the sophomore jinx following 1996's Bound.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 13, 2023

I know almost nothing of the intricate techniques that make The Matrix as eye-filling as it is brain-numbing, but I can tell you that... [its visuals] are wondrous to behold.

| Jul 13, 2023

If you're looking for a good spring fix of existentialist sci-fi, look no further than The Matrix -- then do everything you can to look deeper than the skin-tight surface.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 13, 2023

Although it's sometimes too confounding for its own good and a little heavy on the Zen-inspired techno-babble, The Matrix is a consistently absorbing assault on the senses.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 13, 2023

There's more form than content in The Matrix, but Bill Pope's swooping, noir-inflected cinematography is wonderfully complemented by Owen Paterson's inventive production design, a great soundtrack and the best fight choreography this side of Hong Kong.

| Jul 13, 2023

Give [the Wachowskis] an A for effort and three A's for those effects. The Matrix is a dazzlingly original visual adventure.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 13, 2023

Casting the robotic Reeves as the hope of humanity may be this oppressively long, self-satisfied movie's funniest gag, but it doesn't really make the game any fun. It means we get stuck with the least interesting player.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jul 13, 2023

The Matrix's pleasures are considerable, but they're all purely visceral, too, lacking the mythology that would have elevated the movie. The movie is best taken as the first entry in a brand-new genre: post-modern sci-fi pulp.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 13, 2023

How could filmmakers who are so skilled and imaginative lose themselves (and us) in what feels like a college stab at Aldous Huxley metaphysics?

| Jul 13, 2023

A futuristic paranoia extravaganza, it would seem to have far more appeal to an artificial intelligence than it would to human beings and other carbon-based life forms.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 13, 2023

An interminable, sterile, exercise in cinematographic onanism. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 13, 2023

Like last year's Dark City, the effects and storyline of The Matrix plow through enough fresh territory to make it worth seeing.

| Original Score: B | Jul 13, 2023

Visually, at least, The Matrix more than lives up to its billing. Writer-directors [the Wachowskis] seem to literally bring the screen to life with action scenes that define the word kinetic.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 13, 2023