The Cell: Critic Reviews

The Cell makes the mistake of thinking that we're going to be captivated by a story that devotes most of its length to ugly hallucinations.

The movie impresses more than it entertains, conjuring up a head full of evocative images that don't really evoke all that much.

Tarsem uses the dramatically shallow plot to create a dream world densely packed with images of beauty and terror that cling to the memory even if you don't want them to.

A movie with no plot, no logic, no meaning.

Sigmund Freud's description of the id as "a cauldron full of seething excitations" could just as easily apply to this literal exploration into the darkest, filthiest corners of a serial killer's mind. A chilling journey into dark religious iconography.

A by-the-numbers story becomes the incidental backbone of one of the most visually arresting films of recent memory.

The dream sequences are so well-done that it's easy to forgive the film's lack of dramatic punch.

Lopez wades through many nonsensical, pompous, gradually annoying dream-logic scenes.

What could have been a by-the-numbers serial killer mystery becomes a beautiful tour de force of film magic.

Lopez is hard to take as the empathetic psychologist who uses a synaptic transfer machine to penetrate the comatose killer's tortured psyche in hopes of finding his latest victim.

Visually stunning, but rather pedestrian.

It's excellent.

It's not the villain but the director who seems most interested in these grisly spectacles. He was certainly uninterested in his characters.

The Cell may be another repellent serial killer movie, but at least it tries something different.

The cop/serial killer part of the story (written by Mark Protosevich) offers absolutely nothing of interest.

Writer Mark Protosevich and director Tarsem Singh, both making their feature debut, have crafted the year's first masterpiece, an insanely ambitious movie that miraculously fulfills every one of its ambitions.

This is a mind-bending acid trip of a movie -- fresh, disturbing and inimitable.

D'Onofrio proves that his performance as the bug-wearing-an-Edgar-suit in Men in Black was no fluke.

An amazing, courageous, and thoroughly dark visualization of what the inside of a deeply troubled mind might look like.

With little room for either narrative detail or character development, Tarsem's exploration of a deranged mind soon loses momentum.

This movie is bad in so many ways that it's difficult to know where to begin.

The movie looks so good that its dazzling appearance hides some shortcomings.

In the end, maybe The Cell isn't about much, and it could have been deeper and all but as it stands, it's still a must-see.

The plot is a formulaic ditty where the cop uses a beautiful woman as bait to trap the killer. It has very little to do with surrealism or desert photography.

The Cell is not just another serial killer flick. Despite its horrific theme and graphic violence, it's a stunning work of art.