The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Critic Reviews

An extravagantly ambitious movie that's easy to admire but a challenge to love.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button sighs with longing and simmers with intrigue while investigating the philosophical conundrums and emotional paradoxes of its protagonist's condition.

Remove "curious" from the title and replace it with "twee and pointless", and you're close to it. What a incredible shaggy-puppy of a movie, a cobweb-construction patched together with CGI, prosthetics, gibberish and warm tears.

The film, ambitious if flawed, also is lyrical and melancholy as it tells the story of a man aging backward.

Benjamin Button is little more than Gump by way of Dorian Gray. It plays too safe when it should be letting its freak flag fly.

If this movie is uncharacteristically radiant (and, my, is it), then it's also aloof and unexpectedly ordinary.

Mostly, the film is an orgy of excess, in which Fincher indulges his passion for luxuriant image-making, with little regard for whether the story merits (or can withstand) such grandiose treatment.

The film quickly outgrows any sense of gimmickry and matures into a one-of-a-kind meditation on mortality, time's inexorable passage and the fleeting sweetness of love.

Director David Fincher has turned out an overlong, Forrest Gumpian exercise in mannered whimsy. It's sentimental; it's episodic; it dawdles. Brad Pitt spends a good length of screen time drinking tea with Tilda Swinton. But it's also bewitching.

There's leisure to the storytelling, a splendor that captures the movie's celebratory but also melancholy ideas about our time on this mortal coil.

It's too bad that I can barely remember the movie after only a week. Nothing lasts, indeed.

Given the resources and talent here, quite a movie might have resulted. But it's so hard to care about this story.

It's Fincher's picture, and his universe is one of exquisite fakery and frequent, elegant visual delight.

A gravely beautiful drama about the mysteries of aging and death.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button puts a Hollywood sheen on a decidedly eccentric yarn.

Fincher renders the era with a precise eye for atmosphere and physical detail.

Initially intriguing and often dazzling, it ultimately drags on too long, with its wonder succumbing to frustration as the minutes drift by.

A curiosity, you might say.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a monumental achievement -- not only one of the best films of the year, but one of the greatest films ever made.

A richly satisfying serving of deep-dish Hollywood storytelling.

It takes a world-class storyteller and a great yarn to rivet your attention for nearly three hours. This very classy, old-school movie -- employing cutting-edge technology that will make your eyes pop -- did it for me.

Pitt is quite good in the lead even if it does take close to two hours for him to show up in a matinee idol form we've all come to know. It's an underplayed performance, nicely pitched against great actresses.

A magical and moving account of a man living his life resoundingly in reverse, very loosely based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short tale from 1922, it delivers top-notch moviemaking in every department.

A film whose individual parts are more entrancing than the middlebrow whole.