All Critics (178)
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Top Critics (33)
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Fresh (152)
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Rotten (35)
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DVD (48)
Joss Whedon makes a rousing feature-directing debut, exploiting the cult status of his short-lived series Firefly to continue it on the big screen.
Go out and see Joss Whedon's witty whizbang of an action movie, or we will kill a kitten.
It has a great sense of humor about it, an attractive cast and it's just a lot of fun.
Serenity isn't about effects. It's about narrative and characters, and it does a solid job in both areas.
Half a millennium after Neil Armstrong's one small step for mankind and we're back in the saddle again.
Fans get priority seating on the ride, but there's plenty of room for rookies to clamber aboard.
New viewers will be a little bit lost, and old fans won't get quite everything they wanted, but there's enough going on in Serenity and it's all so much fun that it doesn't matter.
In the end you are left with the feeling that Whedon works better on television than in the cinema.
A bit clunky, but entertaining sci-fi. Best for older tweens and up.
A negligible piece of entertainment, competent but forgettable -- basically, a made-for-television movie with delusions of grandeur.
Hardcore fans will undoubtedly be satisfied but its unlikely this will spread much beyond that audience, and even they will find it lacks that human spark and freshness that made the series distinctive and appealing.
For what it is -- viewed as filmmaking in and of itself -- Serenity is tense and smoothly put together.
Joss Whedon's big-screen incarnation of his short-lived TV series Firefly [is a] lively, humor-laden science fiction Western...
A magnificent closer to the series, and Whedon shows how much love he has for his fans by giving us a quality finisher...
Firefly finally has the triumphant finale fans longed for: the excitingly tense, often surprising and even more frequently comical Serenity. Fans will rejoice.
The settings and tone are hyper-real, yet the human behaviour is grounded and credible, the moral conflicts complex and involving. Shiny, intelligent fun.
In the context of an action cinema driven by false hope, misogyny and sadism, Serenity is an inspiring respite.
The movie is a sci-fi buccaneer swashbuckler; Whedon hits all the obligatory space-opera notes, and he does it with a degree of verbal wit and agile pacing that could teach George Lucas a thing or two.
Has a simultaneously sprawling yet intimate quality.
If you're a novice, this is a plucky introduction to Whedon's world and the most fun sci-fi of the year. If you're a devotee, this is the magnificent return you've been praying for.
The Whedon worship gets gushy in some of the extras, but the deleted and extended scenes are more noteworthy than usual, as are three featurettes on the Firefly universe and how the film got made; plus, the outtakes are damn funny.
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