It's difficult to recall another American film that, in pursuing a passionate and personal vision, goes so maddeningly, uproariously wrong.

Full Review | Jul 6, 2010

I will concede the film is not a great success. Too many screens of blinding lights. Too many transitions for their own sake. Abrupt changes of tone.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 14, 2007

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 3, 2007

Bonkers, adventurous, silly, ambitious, charming, foolish; it's all those things and it'll be gone in a week. But it's not mainstream Bore-o fare, and for that it should be celebrated.

| Jan 29, 2007

Ambitious? You bet, but also a towering, tumultuous folly. It's the movie equivalent of a prog-rock double album, short on humour, long on pomposity, and as for what it all means - you might well ask.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 26, 2007

If only all reputed turkeys gave us such a trip.

| Jan 26, 2007

How can so much style, talent and money be squandered in the service of such blatant airheadedness?

| Jan 26, 2007

There is a strange deadness in the film, together with a callow self-importance and self-pity which become more stultifying with every minute that passes.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 26, 2007

First, the good news: The Fountain is only 97 minutes long. Now the bad: that's 97 minutes of rampant metaphysical codswallop.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 26, 2007

Lurches on a thin line between hyper-ornate space oddity and extended perfume advert.

| Original Score: 2/6 | Jan 25, 2007

At heart, this is a simple Zen fable about love and death. In execution, it's a complex and gorgeous mini-epic with sterling performances from its two stars.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 25, 2007

Hope may spring eternal, but this fountain is a dry hole.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 30, 2006

If you're a movie lover who despairs that big-scale filmmaking today consists of little more than a self-cannibalizing system of clichés, then you need, badly, to see The Fountain, soon.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 7, 2006

The Fountain is the story of a gifted artist who dared to reach for the stars and paid for his ambition with a really stupid movie.

| Nov 30, 2006

Mr. Aronofsky's outlook on life remains too constantly pessimistic for my taste, and too completely joyless as well.

Full Review | Nov 29, 2006

Darren Aronofsky clearly didn't set out to make a usual movie...[The Fountain's] a story of overreaching that itself overreaches, but that might have been impossible to avoid.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Nov 27, 2006

This is one of the worst movies of the year.

Full Review | Nov 27, 2006

The movie may have significant truths to impart, although I have my doubts, but it feels too inexperienced, too unworldly, to have earned the right to them.

Full Review | Nov 27, 2006

A tagline has been affixed to the campaign -- 'What if you could live forever?' -- and it has a certain resonance, especially after seeing the film, which makes 96 minutes seem like eternity.

| Nov 23, 2006

Anybody could see that Aronofsky was one of the few American filmmakers who saw the cinema past as a jumping-off point, not a toy store to plunder. His films were full of promise; and more, they delivered on their promises.

| Nov 23, 2006