Rent: Critic Reviews

Time has been kind to the impoverished but sexy middle-class dropouts of Rent, who no longer come off as Broadway-mall versions of the last urban renegades in America.

Chris Columbus's film affirms that Rent belongs in the pantheon of immortal musicals celebrating the self-dramatizing and resilient spirit of youth.

Stage original Taye Diggs, playing an erstwhile friend turned evictor, actually made a stronger screen impression in Malibu's Most Wanted.

Onstage, Rent is a series of power surges, but in the movie the songs leave you flat.

Yes, Rent is about penniless artists who can't afford to eat or pay their electric bills. But must their straits extend to the threadbare filmmaking, too?

Rent is about as timely now as Gigi.

Rent takes to the streets of New York and convulses in song and dance for nearly two solid hours.

A mediocre, unimaginative, inefficient filmmaker, Columbus delivers a Rent that isn't so much bad as perfunctory.

There's still something staid and doggedly stagebound about this Rent, a reluctance to set out for someplace unique and engage the audience on purely cinematic terms.

Rent falls betwixt and between the odd intimacy of theater and the glorious bigness of film -- and vice versa.

Those who haven't seen Rent on the stage will sense they're missing something, and they are.

In terms of its music and lyrics Rent flickers more than it flames.

Whatever qualities powered Rent to its numerous theater awards and long run onstage are missing from this charmless floperetta.

Rent is still Rent, and devotees should adore it while haters will hate it (there are, apparently, plenty of both).

If Rent works -- and most of the time, it does so flawlessly -- it is because it remains Rent.

The movie, directed without a personal stamp of any kind by Chris Columbus, is so slick that the grime comes from a spray can and the grungy bohemian costumes look rented from a Betsey Johnson boutique sale.

Chris Columbus has pasted the grungy La Boheme update onto film with slavish respect for the original material but a shortage of stylistic imagination and raw emotions.

Rent showcases the hipster trend of getting nostalgic about grime and crime: it's slumtimental.

They're saying Rent was of its moment. They're saying that moment has passed. So the point of making the movie is . . . ?

Director Chris Columbus has done what any smart filmmaker would do with a musical and let the songs dictate his movie.

The music and direction feel generic but the cast deserves credit for squeezing every possible drop of emotion out of the material.

It's real -- and, on screen, it's really cringe-worthy. Not quite Phantom of the Opera cringe-worthy, but not as much fun to blow raspberries at, either.