Adaptation: Critic Reviews

Demonstrates that Kaufman, the real Charlie Kaufman, has a rare and really weird talent not only for finding portals into other people's psyches but also for Silly Puttying his own into the stories he tells.

Mr. Cage and Mr. Jonze share a casual, daredevil sensibility, and the two of them -- or should I say the three of them? -- pull off one of the most amazing technical stunts in recent film history.

Cage gives one of the best performances of his recent career as the Kaufmans. He's a natural in this role, especially when that great horse face breaks into an ingratiating grin...

Too smart to ignore but a little too smugly superior to like, this could be a movie that ends up slapping its target audience in the face by shooting itself in the foot.

Adaptation may not be the first movie to examine the creative process. But it's the most playfully brilliant.

Adaptation is simply brilliant.

This is epic, funny, tragic, demanding, strange, original, boldly sincere filmmaking.

Adaptation's success in engaging the audience in the travails of creating a screenplay is extraordinary.

Mired in the inertia of Charlie's writer's block, as if the real Kaufman never found his own passion for the material.

A daring and gleeful rearrangement of film grammar and a zinging ode to the imagination.

Kaufman's carefully constructed screenplay emphasizes so many layers of duality, it's beyond gimmick. It's a world view.

Few recent movies have conveyed so forcefully how people can feel shut out by their own lack of passion, how they yearn to end the emptiness.

What a bewilderingly brilliant and entertaining movie this is.

Almost all of it is funny and provocative in ways many other Hollywood movies, especially the adaptations, can't touch.

Reverberates on so many levels, comic and cosmic, that it is as trippy fun to think about as it is to watch.

It will surprise you. It will delight you. It will give you something truly chewy to take home from the theater.

Consider the irony: Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) wins best screenplay for a movie that's essentially about his failure to write a screenplay. That's worth a gold statuette on its own.

Adaptation gets an A for audacity and a Z for Zzzzz...

Every bit as clever and surprising as Malkovich.

Features what is surely the funniest and most accurate depiction of writer's block ever.

One-of-a-kind near-masterpiece.

What Adaptation nails about writing is the soul-splitting duality of it: The combination of arrogance and neediness, of ego and insecurity, of the writer's lonely inertia with the romantic grandiosity of what they create.

A comic gem with some serious sparkles.

Warped, self-lacerating and giddily hilarious.

Compare Adaptation to Woody Allen's lame Hollywood Ending, and you can see that Kaufman is Allen's true successor-formed by Allen but primed to carry the torch a little farther into the swamp of his own neuroses.