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Top Critics (28)
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Fresh (34)
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DVD (4)
All this sets us up for a "twist" ending, but if you don't predict it a half-hour before its revelation, you surely must have nodded off during baseball practice.
Where's a vampire when you need one?
The movie has a machine-extruded gloss that makes it harder, not easier, to swallow its difficult emotions.
Maudlin and unintentionally hilarious.
While Efron does his best to carry the film, the rest of Charlie St. Cloud feels a bit too formulaic, pretentious and cloying...
If Zac Efron hadn't signed on, this sappy spiritual fantasy would certainly have skipped the cineplex altogether -- in favor of eternal rotation on cable.
[A] ghoulish death comedy.
It's more of a demo reel for Efron than a movie. His predominant fan base, though, won't mind a bit.
There's a soft allure at play here, but it's largely overshadowed by a well-worn dialogue, and an often muddled plot.
Guys certainly shouldn't throw their dignity out of the window to go see it alone, but if their girlfriends are dragging them along, they might just enjoy it a lot more than expected.
Let's all go play baseball in the park with some ghosts, rather than wasting our time watching this silly, silly film.
Ttearjerking amalgam of Nicholas Sparks and M Night Shyamalan won't do Zac Efron any favours in his attempts to be taken seriously...
There's not much on this movie's mind but photogenic healing, and making all the girls go ga-ga at the sight of Efron mewling with grief.
Cynics will find the film mawkish, but the story-telling is clear and involving.
What might have been a poignant exploration of the effects of bereavement is hamstrung by rotten twists, redundant action scenes and a few too many publicist-approved shots of Efron staring wistfully into the sunset.
This movie's a teenage tear-jerker and it does its job very well.
While the subject matter tends towards morbidity, the film-makers strive to divert us with many dappling sunsets, the blue of Ephron's eyes and a sappy melodrama that even 13-year-old girls might scoff at.
Shame it's so slow and contradicts its own strained logic, ending up in the same listless limbo as The Time Traveler's Wife and The Lovely Bones.
Future historians of the financial crisis may point to this movie, not Oliver Stone's Wall Street sequel, as the cultural low point of the business world.
Efron excels, proving he's leading-man material. But sign-post scoring and drill-'em-home emotional beats weigh things down. Rubbish ending, too.
More maudlin than subtle, more schmaltzy than emotionally true.
Another solid performance by Zac Efron is flattened by bombastic filmmaking.
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