Whether the two halves of Something Wild -- the offbeat romp and the horrifying wallow -- fit successfully in the same film is debatable... But, viewed on their individual merits, both halves are brilliantly crafted.

| Jan 22, 2025

Something Wild is based more on first principles than anything new, but it applies them with such vigour that the movie has a sense of limitless freedom. It tastes like free-range chicken, rather than battery-produced.

| Jan 22, 2025

Something Wild is rough-edged. It doesn’t have the grace of Demme’s Citizens Band and Melvin and Howard or the heightened simplicity of his Stop Making Sense. It has something else, though -- a freedom that takes off from the genre framework.

| Sep 13, 2023

'Something Wild' plays like a screwball Hitchcock film reworked for the freewheeling eighties indie culture. It’s playful and colorful but doesn’t shy away from the darkness at the end of the road.

| Jun 3, 2022

It's not every day that someone goes Alfred Hitchcock one better, but in ''Something Wild,'' Jonathan Demme has done it.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 11, 2020

As an artefact from a period -- the mid-80s -- that produced almost nothing distinctive, this remains breezy fun.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 11, 2020

Something Wild is fun, at first. Then it becomes deadly and weird and engrossing. Predictable it is not.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 11, 2020

Buy a ticket to this whirligig of a movie at your own risk. You enter a fun house and exit through a chamber of horrors. But director Jonathan Demme provides a heck of a ride.

| Jun 11, 2020

This is the Demme of "Melvin and Howard," soaring back where he belongs, and long overdue too.

| Jun 11, 2020

Something Wild is an excellent movie about the fragility of people's images. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Apr 21, 2020

It's a rather routine storyline that's perpetually employed to striking, enthralling effect by Demme...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 21, 2020

The end's not unexpected, and the soundtrack's overloaded with songs, but once Something Wild gets really wild -- with Daniels and Griffith and Demme's fringe comedy at their best -- the movie makes its mark as offbeat entertainment.

| Feb 26, 2020

Part screwball comedy and part thriller, the unpredictable turns of Something Wild indeed chart its characters' untamed, untapped inner resources.

| Aug 28, 2018

Something Wild is undoubtedly a minor work in the oeuvre of all its major players, yet it is never less than charming, and at times is almost inspired.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 5, 2018

Captures the tension of trying to stand out in cookie-cutter world without alienating everyone around you.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 10, 2017

Radiantly human even as, and after, it erupts in violence and rage, "Something Wild" remains an astonishing rarity - a bittersweet romantic tragicomedy that's generally optimistic ... but also hesitant and harmful exactly where it needs to be.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 26, 2016

The tones shift rampantly, which for some viewers can be disorienting and off-putting. But, if you're in tune with Demme's aesthetic, which usually runs counter to our cinematic intuition, it is a wild ride indeed.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 20, 2011

It begins with a meet-cute and ends with a murder, and sandwiched in between those emotional extremes are romance, regret and revenge.

| May 17, 2011

If you don't already know where it ends up then I assure you that you have no idea where it's going to end up.

| Original Score: 8/10 | May 16, 2011

A fun, offbeat, and mildly subversive comedy ... with unexpected twists and ... a real sense of danger.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 13, 2011