The Croods Reviews
The Playlist
Though impressive in many technical and surface ways, it lets us down on the essentials of character and story, and no amount of late-stage father/daughter bonding or vertiginous 3D cliffside tumbling can make up for that.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Patheos
What's happening in America? Are there really scores of concerned but overprotective parents locking their daughters in padded rooms and not letting them experience any adventures? Actually, maybe Hollywood has a point.
Time Out Chicago
The latest advances in computer animation have been applied to a truly primitive comedy-Ice Age recast with a family of nattering Neanderthals.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
The Skinny
Loud, dull and daft, this piece could do with crawling back to the cinematic primordial soup.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
What Culture
DreamWorks' latest is a lusciously mounted but simple-minded adventure that won't long linger in your memory.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Top CriticA handful of adrenalizing sequences of animated anarchy can't save this story from feeling overly primitive.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
"The Croods" rests on the notion of the patriarch who must learn to adapt and let go. (I resent this storyline, for the record.)
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Times-Picayune
It does a lot of things well, but nothing extraordinarily. The end result is a solidly middle-of-the-road - and thus forgettable - bit of slapsticky animation.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Daily Telegraph
You do rather wonder if an American studio will ever again have the nerve to make a children's animation with the simple, unblunted power of Dumbo or Bambi.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Empire Magazine
Bold visually but thumpingly ordinary storytelling.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Like the continents, it's a little too easy to drift away.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Mania.com
It's product, pure and simple: dependable, disposable and forgotten as soon as it serves its purpose.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Film Racket
It's a lot better than some of the titles aimed at tykes, but anyone older than 10 may be hard pressed to find anything of value here outside of engaging eye candy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Antagony & Ecstasy
An impressive, colorful, imaginatively-designed cartoon adventure, rather spoiled by being shackled to a deeply perfunctory story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
I'd like to take back all those times I said Nicolas Cage was one of the most annoying actors on film. It turns out he's equally terrible when he's only on the soundtrack.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Bullz-Eye.com
Insert your own joke here about the caveman movie suffering from a lack of development.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Neither as thrilling nor as funny as it ought to be.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Total Film
For the most part it's Neanderthal compared to the Pixar stable.
