Eye of the Beholder: Critic Reviews

Remove the directorial flash and filigree, and its narrative would be easier to track.

The film's plot degenerates into a psychological mess.

As misogynistic as anything I've seen in ages, it's tricked up with enough fancy cinematography (by Guy Dufaux) to guarantee it sub-Hitchcockian credentials of the sort that some reviewers eagerly hand out to Brian De Palma.

Pointless

It's late January, winter is entrenched, and in the lull between the bounty of Christmas and the renewal of spring, the big screen can sometimes seem barren -- a movable famine.

In trying to both inflame and indict our morbid curiosity, Elliott fails to make the needed connection between the audience and a peeper who has lost his moral balance.

It isn't insultingly bad; it's just incompetent.

You're unlikely to see a scene as weird as the one where McGregor beats up Judd's blind fiancee, as a way to warn him that she'll kill him. That seems counter-intuitive, but nothing in Eye of the Beholder reeks of anything near the notion of intuition.

The result is compellingly bonkers.

It's not good when you check your watch every 20 minutes during a 107-minute movie. It's bad when you think, "Yeaahh, rrright" almost as often.

During one scene, some characters take a break by watching a video of Roger Corman's great 1960 The Wasp Woman. I suggest you do the same.

On the bright side, I only lost an hour and half of my life watching this piece of [expletive deleted], unlike those involved in the making of it, who lost months.

As if to make up for the disjointed quality of the story, director Elliott has incorporated various themes into the film, such as the repetitive use of snow globes, angel statues, and astrology... Unfortunately, these things only pretty up a bad picture.

McGregor's and Judd's attentive, focused performances never allow their characters to become lost in Elliott's fractured, virtual America.

Unfortunately, Elliott's latest effort contained too many blanks for me to fill in.

If you took five different jigsaw puzzles, threw the pieces together on a table top and spent two hours trying to make a cohesive picture, you might end up with something along the lines of this.

Eye of the Holder makes you wonder how bad are the scripts that Ashley Judd and Ewan McGregor turn down.

The film maintains its story perfectly from the beginning, creating a gorgeous atmosphere and layering the story with hints of thriller, mystery, romance and psychological drama.

A disappointing flick.

Moving at the pace of blood through the veins, "Beholder" has the power to alter time, making an hour forty-five seem like three.

I can't elevate this above Rental level, because it was creepy, worth seeing, but kind of dumb.

a clumsy mix of film noir and the serial killer genre, with some surveillance paranoia and Freudian psychology thrown in for good measure

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but these eyes see little beauty in this senseless dud.

There was probably some intended meaning behind this hullabaloo of nonsensical imagery, but somehow it all gets lost.

Ugly is in the Eye of the Beholder.