The Cider House Rules Reviews
Top CriticIt's not a story so much as a reverie about possible stories.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Flipside Movie Emporium
It's hard to believe that an embarrassment like this will be remembered for anything other than its own mediocrity.
Full Review
| Original Score: D
Combustible Celluloid
Just as tepid and surface-level as Simon Birch was.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Perceived as too soft by some and too weird and kinky by even more.
The only way this House could rule would be in a much less competitive season.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The Cider House Rules pales by comparison with the gutsier, more full-bodied adaptation of Irving's The World According to Garp.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
San Francisco Examiner
Maguire is party to the scenic movie Hallstrom's making but offers an otherwise absent naturalism that's alluring and identifiable in it very ordinariness.
Old School Reviews
Welcome to 'independent'-thinking Miramax (a/k/a. Hollywood Lite)
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Cinemaphile.org
So underwhelming and vacant that it's impossible for many to understand what exactly the picture is trying to say.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Matinee Magazine
Registers so little that you might as well be watching a blank screen.
Full Review
| Original Score: short
Film Blather
Meandering and unfocused.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
Cinerina
I am probably going to be whipped behind the woodshed for saying so, but I was seriously underwhelmed by this Best Picture nominee.
Full Review | Original Score: 3
rec.arts.movies.reviews
It's mostly well-made and good-looking, and it's also mostly empty.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Scott Renshaw's Screening Room
The Cider House Rules walks an awkward tightrope between edgy humanism and dangerous sentimentality.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
Misses Irving's main gifts, despite his own best scriptwriting intentions.
Boxoffice Magazine
A disappointingly sleepy and exceedingly dull version of an idiosyncratic, offbeat and memorable novel.
Philadelphia City Paper
Numbness is pretty much where you end up at the end of The Cider House Rules.
As paternalistic, puffed-up, and dull as a congressional debate about abortion rights.
Film Written Magazine
Its appeal is not universal.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Irish Times
