Cloverfield: Critic Reviews

A surreptitiously subversive, stylistically clever little gem of an entertainment.

Works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt.

A surprisingly gripping thriller. Employing a pseudo-documentary handheld camera style, it offers a fresh spin on the monster movie genre.

A relentless, I-thought-my-eyeballs-were-bleeding exercise in visual disorientation.

Cloverfield captures the chronic self-absorption of the Facebook generation with breathless, cleverly recycled media savvy, and then it stomps that self-absorption to death. These days, that's entertainment.

The mechanism is the message in Cloverfield, a movie so aluminum-sleek, ultra-portable, and itsy-bitsy sexy, it's amazing Steve Jobs didn't pull it out of an envelope at Macworld.

It's fun in its morbidly campy way.

An efficiently gripping sci-fi/horror romp.

A remarkably economical, street-level view of widespread panic caused by an abomination that gets, and ultimately needs, no explanation.

Fully visceral, visually impressive.

We've sat through that kind of movie again and again, but we've never sat through anything with Cloverfield's subjective sting. You'd have to be tougher than I was not to be blown sideways by it.

Under the modern flummery, behind the faux amateurism and the handheld shudder, Cloverfield is a vastly old-fashioned piece of work, creaking with hilarious contrivance.

An effective film, deploying its special effects well and never breaking the illusion that it is all happening as we see it.

There's nothing to Cloverfield, really, but stripped-down chaos shot in a faux-verite Blair Witch Project fashion...But I have to say, I was with it.

The fleeting, incomplete glimpses of the monster early on prove the old dictum of B-movie auteur Val Lewton that a momentary image can have greater impact than a prolonged one.

The running and climbing, the tidal waves of debris rushing down the avenues, the screams and carnage grow tiresome.

It's the end of the world as captured on an unsteady camcorder, a YouTube panic attack.

Cloverfield is visceral attack that it leaves the viewer reeling for details that flew by like so many bricks raining off broken buildings.

A twitchy thrill ride that's relentless in its escalation of tension, merciless in its intensity.

An old-fashioned monster movie dressed up in trendy new threads.

A jolt to the genre. The camera tumbles, the smoke billows, gigantic footsteps thunk, women shriek and the car alarms blare. And we are there.

Smartly reconjures the 1950s monster movie for the digital age.

Reeves does a masterful job wedding the restricted perspective of Hud's lens with CGI glimpses of an already blasted cityscape. This is the gimmick's raw excitement phase -- we're hooked.

Maybe we now live in a world where we record the moment first and feel it later. If that's the case, Cloverfield leaves us waiting to feel.

Despite a first reel entirely devoted to establishing characters, Cloverfield is basically a line-'em-up, pick-'em-off horror movie that's effective without being either viscerally frightening or emotionally moving.