Across the Universe: Critic Reviews

Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you've tumbled.

After two hours of butchered classics, it's just a relief when it's over.

An often-dazzling rock opera set to the accompaniment of 33 Beatles songs.

Across the Universe, in which Taymor shoehorns, contorts and otherwise bullies some of the Fab Four's greatest hits into a vapid Hollywood musical, is the kind of project that must have looked great on paper. On screen, eh, not so much.

Contrary to what you may have heard, love isn't all you need.

The movie is no more than an interesting experiment and a rarity among movie musicals in that even if you enjoy it, you won't want to hear it again.

...Julie Taymor's rhapsodic mash note to John, Paul, George and Ringo falls just short of breathtaking.

Across the Universe isn't beholden to any stage incarnation. It owes its vision to the vibrant imagination of its director, who created a musical that reminds us how cultural-political events can change our tune.

The experience of the movie is joyous.

If you can get past its relatively minor failings, it's hard not to be seduced by the big heart of this chaotic, colorful movie.

The Rent-like ensemble of yearning young people at the center of the story is a drag; I wanted to turn the sound down on them and say rude things.

Sometimes it works brilliantly, other times (masked dancers gyrating on ocean waves -- ick!) you just want to run.

A groundbreaking, rule-bending, expectation-smashing musical.

Across the Universe is a classic example of ambition exceeding execution.

There's a lot of great stuff here, but it just doesn't come together.

Julie Taymor has delivered an audacious, idiosyncratic creation that plays like a riff on Hair with Fab Four cachet, stretching a thin love story across one tumultuous decade.

An interesting failure, not a fascinating one.

You'd have been better off sampling the brown acid at Woodstock than risking brain cells on Across the Universe, the bizarrely ornate nail Julie Taymor hammers into the Beatles' coffin.

...the long and winding road that is Julie Taymor's opulent, eye-filling, and disappointingly uninvolving musical extravaganza...

Yes, this is tour de force stuff, and yet, just like a good pop tune, the premise is all boy-meets-girl simplicity.

One could never argue that Across the Universe isn't ambitious. However, like many ambitious movies, this one fails spectacularly.

Despite all the inventive work, the film never achieves the soaring sense of bliss that would place it in the pantheon of movie musicals.

Even those resistant to or unmoved by the story can appreciate Taymor's settings of the songs, and the arrangements by T-Bone Burnett and other studio masters.