It sometimes seems like there is more legitimate creativity in [Malkovich] than there's been in almost every other movie released this year. The script is completely insane and consistently brilliant, and it's funny on almost every level imaginable.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 30, 2023

... a devastatingly funny portrait of unhappiness, desperation, desire, and the vicious things we do for love...

Full Review | Apr 8, 2023

The very meta tale stars and is about thespian and sometime Cambridge resident John Malkovich and the puppeteer (John Cusack) who discovers a portal into his brain.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 10, 2020

The intense invention and creativity at work in this extraordinary movie is overwhelming.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 9, 2020

Kaufman and Jonze steer us through a truly twisted psychological and existential swamp.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 30, 2019

Outlandish, hilarious and exceedingly clever.

Full Review | Aug 9, 2019

For two hours, it works like the best music videos: making high-concept philosophies graspable, marvelous and fun.

Full Review | Apr 30, 2019

What could have developed into a one-gag film becomes a gender-bending extravaganza with a crazy network of love triangles... The real magic of Being John Malkovich is that it never fails to surprise.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 13, 2019

Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's hallucinatory meditation on human embodiment, celebrity, and, uh, John Malkovich remains the ultimate marriage of '90s music-video aesthetics and absurdist narrative storytelling.

Full Review | Mar 26, 2019

Accept that even Jonze and Kaufman will most likely never provide a worthy substitute to Being John Malkovich themselves. It's awfully hard, even 20 years later, to find a movie even half as bizarre that was also even half as successful.

Full Review | Mar 25, 2019

Fabulously funny and delightfully disturbed, "Being John Malkovich'' is the ultimate voyeur movie, a dark and at times malevolent take on what it's like to be in someone else's skull, looking out.

Full Review | Jun 12, 2018

The beauty of the film is the way it elevates John Malkovich from an actor to an axiom.

Full Review | Mar 22, 2018

It's a film, indeed, of such jaw-dropping originality that its flaws -- and it definitely has some -- count for far less than they otherwise would.

Full Review | Nov 27, 2017

Though Being John Malkovich was deliciously original and delivers an underrated performance by John Cusack, the ending was a bit disappointing.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Sep 11, 2017

There's something fantastically proto-Internet about this romantic-dramedy of flop-sweat desperation, role-playing, simulation and eccentric, niche-culture behaviour-a world of virtual-reality escapes, alter egos, sexual fetishes and rabbit-hole trips.

Full Review | Feb 7, 2014

an essential existentialist text.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 25, 2012

An incredibly rich and entertaining (not to say, laudably malevolent) film that far transcends its already way-out title premise ...

Full Review | Jun 18, 2012

Playing by its own rules every step of the way, Being John Malkovich is clearly the sort of movie that needs to be made more often.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 14, 2012

Full Review | Original Score: A | May 12, 2012

[VIDEO ESSAY] Corollaries of desire break through dead-end walls only to be reinvented on the other side in a supernatural spectrum of practical existence. Go figure.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Apr 3, 2012