Crossing Over: Critic Reviews

Director Wayne Kramer crisscrosses these stories into a diverting anthropological melodrama, with enough 
coincidence to keep the action unified.

Crossing Over delivers its sanctimony with less hand-wringing and more fist-shaking, complete with lurid violence and periodically bared female flesh.

Crass, contrived, tackily salacious and politically loaded in the most insidious way, this dodgy piece of nonsense purports to be an ensemble, multi-stranded drama in the style of Traffic or Crash.

Crossing Over has hurtled into Crash territory, and the smash-up is not a happy collision.

Maybe if he [director Wayne Kramer] had kept Crossing Over simpler, he would have made a less simplistic movie.

It's Crossing Over -- or as we call it at my desk, Crash: Special Victims Unit.

The issue of illegal immigration deserves a thoughtful movie. This isn't it.

Crossing Over has its heart in umpteen places and its head stuffed with dramatic claptrap.

You see, it's all a bit too interlocking, a cable series jammed into a couple of hours.

Crossing Over crosses into the mythic realm of camp. What a waste. I still say it's better than Crash, though.

Crossing Over seems to strain, with too many characters, too many story strands and too much of an effort to cover the bases.

The characters don't relate; they trade expedient expository nuggets, when they're not speechifying. A surfeit of coincidence spoils our empathy. And when a character%u2014any character%u2014says "You doubt the veracity of my heart," you have to doubt the

[Crossing Over] has a paint-by-numbers quality.

A responsible message movie wrapped in an irresponsible exploitation flick that cries fire in a crowded theater.

There are good performances here, but the sheer number dilutes their power, leaving the movie a bit of a mess.

Writer-director Wayne Kramer gets uniformly terrific performances from a fine cast playing pawns in the game of sex, violence and betrayal that diminishes the noble tradition of naturalized citizenship.

An overweeningly deterministic mosaic of U.S. immigration case studies.

This is a movie with the courage to examine the pressing issue of whether hot blond Aussie starlets are sleeping with government agents -- whom they meet in fender benders -- to get green cards.

The film is so choppy, especially in the final going, it appears that entire reels have been cut.

All we get is a mess of good liberal intentions loosely anchored to a mass of pure Hollywood hokum.

An interesting failure, a movie that at least strives to be about something, entangling itself with the question of what it means to be an American -- or, more specifically, what it means to deserve to live here.

All of its plot threads are equally dreadworthy.

Crossing Over may hold some appeal for those who loved Crash, but this is a diluted cousin to a film that was overrated in the first place.

The film is rife with coincidences, and it frequently strains credulity.