Cloud Atlas Reviews
Top CriticWhatever your age, even if life is an ocean made up of many drops, you may resolve that life is too short for this errant nonsense.
A film which piles on the action, the romance, the philosophical inquiry and the silly accents until the viewer is left punch-drunk and reeling. Seriously, what's not to love?
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| Original Score: 4/5
They key to successfully absorbing the movie may be in not trying to overthink what's on screen.
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| Original Score: 3/4
An eminently peculiar mismatch of substance and form, like a Hallmark card written by David Foster Wallace.
The result is maddening, exasperating, occasionally exhilarating -- and mostly boring.
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| Original Score: C
For all the spectacular settings and visionary designs, Cloud Atlas left me feeling disconnected
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Felicitous moments can't break through the dark nebula of self-importance around Cloud Atlas ...
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Sumptuous visuals and audacious acting, but the quasi-profound message of cosmic connectedness isn't worth all the trouble.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Exciting, exhausting and energizing, a brazen film that leaves somber cinema seeming too passive for its own good. This is a movie as big as life itself.
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| Original Score: A+
"Cloud Atlas" deserves praise if only for not being the baggy, pretentious disaster it could have been in other hands.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
he best thing about Cloud Atlas is that it could, and should, turn into a properly divisive film... but one has to ask: does it allow for immersion? Even as we applaud the dramatic machinery, are we being kept emotionally at bay?
It will aid your experience of the swirling, sweeping dramatic adventure Cloud Atlas, if you embrace the idea of being a little bit lost.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Enormous in length and scope, a film whose purpose doesn't even begin to come into focus until two hours in.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The cumulative effect is one of spectacle over substance.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's a polarizing, ambitious, sometimes beautiful and occasionally maddening epic.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Galumphing and heavy-handed, its rare flights of lyricism stranded between long stretches of outright risibility.
It's funny, violent and prodigiously romantic; it has immense heart and more gorgeous cinematic moments than I can describe.
It plays like a gargantuan trailer for a movie still to be made (one that, given the same ratio, would be 86 hours long).
Finally, what sinks "Cloud Atlas" is not the largeness of its ambitions but the lack of skill it displays in terms of writing, directing and acting.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Did you hear the one about the Zen master who walks up to a hot dog cart, scans the menu, and asks the vendor to "make me one with everything"?
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| Original Score: 2/4
"Cloud Atlas" offers more answers than it does questions, and by the end of its nearly three-hour running time - which flies by surprisingly fast, all things considered - it feels like the most feverishly expensive late-night college bull session ever.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Cloud Atlas is now a film, for better or worse. Mostly worse I'd say, but give these folks credit ...
Cloud Atlas creates awe about worlds seen and unseen, frequently bypassing the brain on the way to the heart and soul.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Take a collection of stories, connect them through portentous themes and watch it all spin. We've seen it before -Babel, anyone? - but nothing is quite like the daft, brazenly ambitious cosmic fantasia ofCloud Atlas.
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| Original Score: B-
Three directors, plus six story lines, times five centuries equals one grandly conceived, impressively mounted megaflop.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
For all its strengths, the film is cursed by an ADD-style structure and a flashy but inevitably ineffective casting stunt.
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| Original Score: 2/5
"Cloud Atlas" is superior filmmaking. Yes, it runs almost three hours - but you've probably seen 90-minute films that felt a lot longer.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
An incomprehensible mess, held together only by the elaborate stunt of having the same actors play wildly divergent roles in each story.
There are moments when it works wonderfully, but too many where it feels overlong and ponderous.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
If the talented Wachowskis are ever going to achieve true artistic nirvana, they're going to have to be more disciplined with their grand ideas, more ruthless in their rewrites.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's kind of astonishing that for all its ambition and accomplishment, and for the ostensibly subversive philosophy it pushes, "Cloud Atlas" ends up being just another platitudinous overblown pummel-you-into-submission movie-machine.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
The movie doesn't really work, but it's fascinating in the ways it doesn't.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
This is by no means the best movie of the year, but it may be the most movie you can get for the price of a single ticket.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Surely this is one of the most ambitious films ever made.
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| Original Score: 4/4
If you're interested in the sheer craft of filmmaking, Cloud Atlas is required viewing - a rare example of a movie getting by entirely on technique and creative bravado.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Cloud Atlas is a cornily enthralling sci-fi kaleidoscope.
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| Original Score: B+
It's a puzzle I enjoyed piecing together, but when each tale came to a close and built up to what was intended to be a soaring, emotional climax, I felt no flutter in the chest or tingle up my spine.
A trash heap of rubber noses and implausible high school accents that give new meaning to the word "pretentious."
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| Original Score: 1/4
"Cloud Atlas" is a film where the creators' admirable reach exceeds their grasp. You may be getting six films for the cost of one, but it may not really be worth the price.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
There is a great deal of humbug about art and love in Cloud Atlas, but it is decidedly unlovable, and if you want to learn something about feeling, you're at the wrong movie.
A bloated, pseudo-intellectual, self-indulgent slog through some notions that are really rather facile.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
These disparate tales have been listlessly smashed together in the hopes that something substantial will emerge.
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| Original Score: 2/5
The cast comes off like a third-rate stock company on the matinee after the night on which everyone got bombed on mescal (and possibly mescaline).
The feeling persists that Tykwer and the Wachowskis made the picture to prove they could.
An intense three-hour mental workout rewarded with a big emotional payoff.
It is so full of passion and heart and empathy that it feels completely unlike any other modern film in its range either measured through scope of budget or sweep of action.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Everything gets homogenized into a blandish whole, the impact of each story softened by the constant need to connect the dots.
'Cloud Atlas' is like the entire 'Matrix' trilogy in micro. It starts out absolutely brilliantly, then segues into a pretentious slog.
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| Original Score: C+
