Lakeview Terrace: Critic Reviews

Unfortunately, Jackson is the best thing here.
 The rest of Lakeview is cravenly engineered to make Wilson's squishy liberal hero a man, and the only surprise is that Neil LaBute directed it for hire.

Considered purely as a formal exercise, Lakeview Terrace is a passable piece of hackwork, with some adequately suspenseful passages.

From certain angles, Lakeview Terrace may look neurotic or even reactionary, but I found it bracingly tactless, particularly because interracial couples are still something of a taboo in modern Hollywood.

As social commentary, it doesn't go deeply enough, and as a psychological thriller, it peters out in silliness.

The movie might have something to say about black racism, but the conversations go nowhere, and the cliches of the genre take over.

Terrace pretends to be about the persecution of a mixed-race couple when really it's about how anyone might react living next door to the shark from Jaws.

The movie's only mark of restraint is the absence of an earthquake.

Lakeview Terrace's resistance to being one thing suggests the time has come when a movie featuring an interracial couple can no longer be merely about race and racism.

It's a shame that the later stages of Lakeview Terrace should overheat and spill into silliness.

I find movies like this alive and provoking, and I'm exhilarated to have my thinking challenged at every step of the way.

The actors make it watchable, but with these incendiary themes, 'watchable' isn't exactly a wildfire.

This is being marketed as a slam-bang entertainment, but it's also one of the toughest and most relevant movies of the year.

By the time the film's frantic, far-fetched climax comes along, Lakeview Terrace's pretense at exploring racial intolerance has been exposed for what it really is: a B-movie copout.

Slick, savvy and well executed, Lakeview Terrace is a typical studio release polished to a blinding sheen thanks to a superior cast and Neil LaBute, America's most dazzlingly gifted un-famous film director.

As Lakeview Terrace moves forward, it becomes clear this isn't a movie about the shuffling of black and white; it's a film about abusing power and desperately clinging to the status quo. It's a film about the fear of the future.

The movie's premise is suitably nerve-wracking and hits close to home: Who hasn't had to deal with a slightly whacked neighbor at some time? The addition of the law-enforcement angle is a clever twist.

Mr. LaBute has fashioned a suspenseful film out of the peculiar vagaries of the casting, which makes us fear the worst at every turn of the plot.

Lakeview Terrace delivers fairly tense and engrossing drama before succumbing to thriller convention.

Lakeview Terrace holds your interest, though the bad faith on all sides makes it something of an endurance test.

Well acted and tautly directed, it's a movie whose juice is its realism, the easily recognizable situation, the paranoia that any homeowner can identify with.

Jackson hasn't had a role this good or this complex in many a moon, even if the rote ending betrays the complexity of the set-up.

In its second half, Lakeview Terrace runs out of steam, culminating in a flatly directed climax, complete with halos of police lights, whirling helicopters and declamatory dialogue.

It's too bad the movie's moderately intriguing qualities are buried under the final half-hour's avalanche of predictability.

Although LaBute has created memorably lacerating portraits of male cruelty and willful dominance, this one doesn't add up.