Twilight Reviews
Top Critic
My hope is that the sequels are actual attempts at movies. The world doesn't need any more toothless cinema.
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| Original Score: C-
A deeply sincere, outright goofy vampire romance for the hot-not-to-trot abstinence set.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Some will find it all too polite, but compared to rival blockbuster exercises in explosive CGI mayhem, its character-based index of longing and protectiveness at least provides a viable alternative moodscape.
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| Original Score: 3/6
I succumbed to the palpable chemistry between the leads, and remembered my own girlish fantasies with something of a head-spinning rush.
I think this film is definitely a victim of it's own expectations.
Unfortunately, it just didn't work.
Twilight, the first movie adapted from Stephenie Meyer's series of best-selling teen novels, is going to be a big hit with young girls, and deservedly so -- the picture delivers.
Twilight the movie is cautious, a sort of Tiger Beat-ified Twin Peaks. In its undercooked way, though, it's enjoyable.
Twilight is silly and melodramatic and hard to dislike in much the same way as its target audience, with a distinctly teenage sense of tragedy.
Twilight is the Diet Coke of vampire movies, but central to the film's success is that you believe in the love between Edward and Bella.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Not that Twilight's fate hangs on intelligibility. It hangs on fangs that aren't bared, and on a bloodlust that isn't indulged.
Twilight works as both love story and vampire story, thanks mainly to the performances of its principals.
Twilight is, by its very nature, all about unfinished business, the story of a brooding, caring romantic hero and the woman who cannot -- although she wants to -- yield to him. Only his eyes penetrate her. For now, that's enough.
My advice: Focus on Pattinson and Stewart. They make you understand why the books sold 17 million copies.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Combines the plot of HBO's True Blood with the intensity level of Saved by the Bell.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg does a decent job adapting the first book in Meyer's series, and despite a tendency toward cheesy effects, Hardwicke keeps things moving swiftly.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Teenage girls are going to love Twilight, and many are sure to see it more than once. Hang on to those earplugs: This time next year, you'll need them again.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Gothic wooziness stifles many of Hardwicke's lighter impulses, such as her knack for jiving humor in scenes among friends and family. And some of the more cartoonishly gymnastic CG stunts look plain silly.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Catherine Hardwicke's choppy direction plays all this much too seriously. The film lacks the clarity and cleverness that might have ameliorated the campier moments.
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| Original Score: C+
This adaptation of the best-selling novel by Stephenie Meyer never rises above the level of a teen soaper on the CW.
[Hardwicke's] earnest, moody approach to Stephenie Meyer's tremendously popular novel may be just the thing for the 14-year-old girl in all of us.
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| Original Score: 3/6
Twilight is often a lot of fun to watch -- the atmosphere of wet green trees and subtle danger, the gothic breathiness of doomed romance, the way all the vampires have better hair than anyone else -- and seems to give its intended audience what it wants.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Meyer is said to have been involved in the production of Twilight, but her novel was substantially more absorbing than the unintentionally funny and quickly forgettable film.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Amazingly, it feels real -- the actors pull it off.
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| Original Score: 3/4
If its muscles are flexed, we can expect three more of these movies. Hopefully, like the Harry Potter films, they'll get better as they go along.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
With its vapor-thin plot and goofy gimmicks (game of vampire baseball, anyone?), Twilight seems best left to its impressionable teenage fans.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It rekindles the warmth of great Hollywood romances, where foreplay was the climax and a kiss was never just a kiss.
As a parable for the dark side of female desire, it's weirdly powerful.
Twilight will doubtless thrill fans of the books, who have long waited for its release. And while it's not a failure, everyone else will wish that the film had, if you'll excuse the expression, a little more bite.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Hardwicke stirs this teen pulp to a pleasing simmer.
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| Original Score: B
There's a playfulness that seems just so right in Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Invest any spare cash you have in companies that deal in hair gel. I have a feeling this film is going to be huge.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Director Catherine Hardwick leads her young cast through the story's soap opera elements with honest respect for the material.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Low-key is not the adjective you'd expect to describe a highly anticipated vampire movie, but there it is.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
There's nothing transporting about the visuals. Twilight was a famously low-budget production compared to most traditional blockbusters, but this is ridiculous.
The movie version gives really good swoon.
The movie was directed by Catherine Hardwicke. She uses her great discovery, Nikki Reed, in the role of the beautiful Rosalie Hale. Reed wrote Hardwick's Thirteen when she was only 14. That was a movie that knew a lot more about teenage girls.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
A disappointingly anemic tale of forbidden love that should satiate the pre-converted but will bewilder and underwhelm viewers who haven't devoured Stephenie Meyer's bestselling juvie chick-lit franchise.
An underwhelming vampire romance long on camp but short on emotional insight.
