JamesG
07-27-2009, 08:03 PM
Movie Reviews: Orphan
27 July 2009 12:05 PM, PDT
Horror films rarely are screened for critics -- let alone get positive reviews from them.
Orphan is an exception.
No less a critic than Roger Ebert has awarded the film 3 1/2 stars. He calls the film "shamelessly effective" -- shameless, apparently, because it concerns a child -- benign on the surface, but with evil powers lurking below. Ebert concedes that the movie "would probably have offended" his late television colleague Gene Siskel, "who had a thing about movies exploiting children in danger."
Yet he concludes: "You want a good horror film about a child from hell? You got one."
Mick Lasalle in the San Francisco Chronicle praises the film for providing "everything you might expect in a psycho-child thriller, but with such excess and exuberance that it still has the power to surprise."
Likewise Claudia Puig remarks in USA Today that Orphan "is a cut above most spooky-kid movies, with a twist that sets it apart."
Likewise Tirdad Derakhshani in the Philadelphia Inquirer concludes: "Orphan, with a perverse plot twist at the end, will keep you on tenterhooks from its nightmarish opening scene to its chilling last frame."
But Kyle Smith in the New York Post says that "the film mangles its twist and fails to deliver an interesting coup de grace or a sharp line of dialogue.
And Manohla Dargis in the New York Times faults the movie for its two-hour length, which she says, "is absurd for a dopey 'boo' movie."
She concludes, "The young actors are very good ... but there's something creepy, and not pleasurably so, about watching children pantomime so much malice and fear."
-IMDB News
27 July 2009 12:05 PM, PDT
Horror films rarely are screened for critics -- let alone get positive reviews from them.
Orphan is an exception.
No less a critic than Roger Ebert has awarded the film 3 1/2 stars. He calls the film "shamelessly effective" -- shameless, apparently, because it concerns a child -- benign on the surface, but with evil powers lurking below. Ebert concedes that the movie "would probably have offended" his late television colleague Gene Siskel, "who had a thing about movies exploiting children in danger."
Yet he concludes: "You want a good horror film about a child from hell? You got one."
Mick Lasalle in the San Francisco Chronicle praises the film for providing "everything you might expect in a psycho-child thriller, but with such excess and exuberance that it still has the power to surprise."
Likewise Claudia Puig remarks in USA Today that Orphan "is a cut above most spooky-kid movies, with a twist that sets it apart."
Likewise Tirdad Derakhshani in the Philadelphia Inquirer concludes: "Orphan, with a perverse plot twist at the end, will keep you on tenterhooks from its nightmarish opening scene to its chilling last frame."
But Kyle Smith in the New York Post says that "the film mangles its twist and fails to deliver an interesting coup de grace or a sharp line of dialogue.
And Manohla Dargis in the New York Times faults the movie for its two-hour length, which she says, "is absurd for a dopey 'boo' movie."
She concludes, "The young actors are very good ... but there's something creepy, and not pleasurably so, about watching children pantomime so much malice and fear."
-IMDB News