Critics Scoreboard
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Average Critic Score:
74
(20 sources)
74
(20 sources)
-
100
Austin Chronicle
Gilliam keeps the audience guessing, and in doing so creates a startlingly effective rumination on the nature of sanity and madness cloaked in the shroud of a sci-fi thriller. Read Full Review » -
100
Christian Science Monitor
Bruce Willis is bruisingly good as the hero and Brad Pitt is suitably zany as the activist who dogs his trail. Read Full Review » -
100
Rolling Stone
Gilliam, along with the gifted cinematographer Roger Pratt and production designer Jeffrey Beecroft, fashions a disturbing and dazzling lost world. Read Full Review » -
90
The New York Times
Fierce and disturbing, with a plot that skillfully resists following any familiar course. The film's hero fears that he's half-crazy, and for two hours Mr. Gilliam artfully keeps his audience feeling the same way. Read Full Review » -
88
ReelViews
It's refreshing to encounter a movie with a logical, intelligent approach to the dangers of zipping through time. Read Full Review » -
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
For all his daring, the brazen creator maintains control - there's aesthetic order in the disorder, and calculated reason in the madness. Seldom has it felt so good to seem so lost. Read Full Review » -
88
San Francisco Examiner
One of the qualities that makes "12 Monkeys" so good is the fact that it is almost too complicated to explain. Read Full Review » -
88
USA Today
A Hitchcockian chase...A crowd-pleasing airport-pursuit pic. [27 Dec 1995, p.D1] Read Full Review » -
83
Entertainment Weekly
As the jabbering psychotic Jeffrey Goines, Brad Pitt has a rabid, get-a-load-of-me deviousness that works for the film's central mystery: We can't tell where the fanatic leaves off and the put-on artist begins. Read Full Review » -
80
TV Guide
That Terry Gilliam managed to make Twelve Monkeys into a clever, complex, and poignant success is as astonishing as it is satisfying. Read Full Review » -
80
Salon.com
To Gilliam's quiver of attributes this new movie adds a quality that's on the endangered list in today's Hollywood: coherence. Read Full Review » -
75
San Francisco Chronicle
A grandiose cinematic invention, cleverly turning the present-day urban American world on its ear. Read Full Review » -
75
Chicago Sun-Times
Any laughs that it inspires will be very hollow. It's more of a celebration of madness and doom, with a hero who tries to prevail against the chaos of his condition, and is inadequate. Read Full Review » -
70
Los Angeles Times
Mystifying, intriguing, even infuriating, it shows what happens when an unconventional talent meets straightforward material. Read Full Review » -
70
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70
Washington Post
In a movie in which time travel is used to rectify the past, it's too bad scriptwriters David and Janet Peoples didn't go through the time/space tunnel to work on that first draft again. Read Full Review » -
60
Chicago Reader
Brad Pitt has fun with his secondary part as a pontificating lunatic, but I wish I'd enjoyed the rest of the cast more. Read Full Review » -
50
The New Yorker
But finally the film is no more than a flamboyant curiosity, replacing the spooky obsessiveness of "La Jetée" with a much tamer kind of weirdness. Also with Brad Pitt, in a showy role as a voluble lunatic; he's dreadful. Read Full Review » -
40
-
40
Time
Intent on both dazzling and punishing the viewer, Gilliam gets lost in creepy spectacle and plenty of old film clips (notably "Vertigo"). But at the sight of three giraffes crossing a city bridge, you'll think of a more recent movie. A bad one. [8 Jan 1996, p.69] Read Full Review »
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