The Royal Tenenbaums Reviews
Top CriticThe film grows on you, but more substance and less calculated quirks would have been a royal treat.
Palo Alto Weekly
This is quirky theater infused with comic highlights, and an unfortunate number of lowlights.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
www.susangranger.com
Whatever hostile, deadpan humor exists is so insular, so inaccessible as to be unfathomable.
Full Review | Original Score: 4/10
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
... somehow can't get its feet on the ground to tell its story without hitting you over the head with its adolescent charm.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
ReelTalk Movie Reviews
A ROYAL pain. It made me squirm instead of laugh.
rec.arts.movies.reviews
To call it merely peculiar is a gross understatement.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/10
If I smiled at all during this colossal misfire, it was at Hackman, who knows how to do cheerfully thoughtless better than anyone around. The rest of the cast looks lost and miserable.
New Times
These characters, archetypes all, never come to life, never engage us, never make us feel.
Eclipse Magazine
In their quest to make this film different, however, I just feel Anderson and Wilson forgot to make it interesting.
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
This is a movie that is so embarrassing that it deserves to be consigned to the cutout bins at the video stores as quickly as possible.
Full Review | Original Score: 1/5
Film Blather
The Royal Tenenbaums is pathetically lazy filmmaking disguised as hip and clever, a boring and indifferent comedy that tries to pull the suddenly popular scam of trying to be emotional in its emotionlessness.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
DustinPutman.com
The comedy is threadbare, the drama plays like an afterthought, and there are too many characters to thoroughly develop any one of them.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Star-Democrat (Easton, MD)
As great as [Hackman] is, he can't save the film single-handedly.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Critical Eye
'...like the lives of the geniuses it centres on, The Royal Tenenbaums is a good looking, angst ridden example of squandered potential.'
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul
Despite countless unique and amazing moments, the movie doesn't quite come together--which may not, in fact, go against the director's master plan.
Cinenganos
Una cinta bastante regular y que en su pretensión aspira a ser más de lo que es, sin lograrlo del todo.
| Original Score: 6/10
Internet Reviews
A spectacularly unfunny film -- a bomb of colossal proportion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Inappropriate directness informs every second of The Royal Tenenbaums, and it just about wrecks the movie.
Greenwich Village Gazette
The characters are one dimensional, the situations, while there is some humor here and there, unfunny, and the plot uninteresting.
