AdaptationMovie Reviews

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Must Go!
Avg. Critic Score: 83 out of 100 Universal acclaim Metascore® based on all critic reviews
Information for Parents:
15 Iffy for 15+
Read Common Sense Media review

Critic scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.

  • 100
    Rolling Stone | Peter Travers

    Screenwriting this smart, inventive, passionate and rip-roaringly funny is a rare species. It's magic. Read full review

  • 100
    Washington Post | Desson Thomson

    May not be the first movie to examine the creative process. But it's the most playfully brilliant. Read full review

  • 100
    Washington Post | Stephen Hunter

    Surely the most creative trick of the year and grimly funny throughout. Read full review

  • 100
    The New York Times | Dana Stevens

    I realize that the fear of contracting writer's block from a fictional character is crazy, but in the brilliantly scrambled, self-consuming world of Adaptation it has a certain plausibility. Read full review

  • 100
    Los Angeles Times | Kenneth Turan

    It's typical of the nerve, the bravado, the sheer giddy playfulness and sense of fun that characterize what has to be the boldest and most imaginative studio film of the year. Read full review

  • 100
    Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

    What a bewilderingly brilliant and entertaining movie this is. Read full review

  • 91
    Entertainment Weekly | Lisa Schwarzbaum

    The notion of meta has never been diddled more mega than in this giddy Möbius strip of a movie, a contrivance so whizzy and clever that even when it tangles at the end, murked like swampy southwestern Florida itself, the stumble has quotation marks around it. Read full review

  • 90
    Variety | Todd McCarthy

    All but stealing the film is Cooper, who seizes a rare opportunity as an extroverted, rather than buttoned-up, character to bust loose like an uncaged alligator. Read full review

  • 75
    San Francisco Chronicle | Mick LaSalle

    Snags on the fact that neither story depicted -- not Kaufman's and especially not Orlean's -- is enough to sustain more than an incidental interest. Read full review

  • 63
    USA Today | Mike Clark

    Even at its best, Adaptation is one of the movie year's most esoteric outings -- more so than even Paul Thomas Anderson's far superior "Punch-drunk Love." Too smart to ignore but a little too smugly superior to like, this could be a movie that ends up slapping its target audience in the face by shooting itself in the foot. Read full review

View more reviews for Adaptation on Metacritic

Information for Parents
Common Sense Media says Iffy for 15+ Adult stuff only but hilarious and fresh.
What Parents Need to Know Parents need to know that the movie has very mature material, including very strong language, brief nudity, sexual references and situations (including masturbation and a porn Web site), drinking, smoking, and drug use. The movie has quasi-comic violence, but characters are injured and killed. Characters break the law, including stealing from nature preserves and making psychotropic drugs.
  • Families can talk about how we chose our passions - or whether they choose us. Do Laroche and Orlean envy each other? Does Charlie envy Donald? Why did Charlie the real-life screenwriter divide himself in two in the movie portrayal? Why did he take real-life characters like Susan Orlean and John Laroche and have their movie characters do things that they never did? What do you learn from Laroche's reason for not fixing his teeth? If you were going to re-create yourself as a movie character, what would you write? This movie both uses and makes fun of many movie conventions - which ones did you spot?
What to watch for
  • violence false3 Violence: Violence and peril, characters hurt and killed.
  • sex false4 Sex: Explicit sexual references and situations.
  • language false4 Language: Very strong language
  • consumerism false3 Consumerism: Not an issue
  • drugsalcoholtobacco false5 Drinking, drugs and smoking: Drinking, smoking, and drug use
An independent nonprofit dedicated to providing families the information they need to help kids thrive in a world of media and technology. © Common Sense Media Inc. 2010. All rights reserved.

Adaptation Movie Ratings + Reviews

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So-so 101 fan reviews

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