Jennifer's Body 2009

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: The tone wavers, the direction's slackly indecisive and visually drab, and in the middle of it is a thinly conceived antagonist played by Megan Fox. Honestly, she's a pretty bad actress. She doesn't seem to get Cody's sense of humor. At all. Read more

Kathleen Murphy, MSN Movies: The amateurishly directed 'Jennifer's Body' is a bust as ha-ha horror movie. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: Cody throws one too many losses at Needy; the screenwriter loses her satiric way about halfway through. But for a while, this has real fangs. Read more

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times: Seyfried approaches her role with such honesty and vulnerability that she transforms the movie; you see, in her bottomless blue eyes, that she long ago accepted being the girl that nobody noticed. Read more

Scott Tobias, AV Club: Cody will stop a scene cold for the chance to shoehorn "move on dot org" into a sentence. Read more

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: While Fox's performance as a high-school girl possessed by a demon would seem key to the fortunes of the film, Amanda Seyfried, as her unlikely best friend, Needy, makes it more interesting than it would be. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: Jennifer's Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre. Read more

Noah Berlatsky, Chicago Reader: The flashes of competence just emphasize the extent to which the film has no idea what it's doing. Read more

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: Director Karyn Kusama finds resonant terror in details: the look Anita and Jennifer exchange before Jen's fateful ride, or a victim's last-minute ah-hah. Read more

Adam Graham, Detroit News: There are probably worse ways to go out than being devoured by Fox... but the film squanders all the fun from what could have been a hilarious, gore-filled romp. Read more

Laremy Legel, Film.com: It's almost as if no one knows what to do with Megan Fox. Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: Jennifer's Body is never scary and it's only sporadically amusing. Read more

Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times: [Cody's] glib teen-hip dialogue mostly feels like self-conscious splatter over a sorely lackluster scare flick. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: Not since Brian De Palma's Carrie has a horror movie so effectively exploited the genre as a metaphor for adolescent angst, female sexuality and the strange, sometimes corrosive bonds between girls who claim to be best friends. Read more

Rafer Guzman, Newsday: Last year, a ... horror flick called Teeth, about a ... girl who had incisors where she shouldn't, covered this territory with more creativity, complexity and humor. Jennifer's Body, for all its promise, could use some of that bite. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: As screenwriter Diablo Cody might say in her irritatingly pop-cult way, this zombie-chick horror-satire is more dead-eyed than Blake Lively. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: Fox eats and heats up screen. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: Clever one-liners don't cover the cruelty here. Jennifer is shallow. The movie about her is, too. Read more

Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer: As a horror movie, Jennifer's Body doesn't fully deliver. But as a comic allegory of what it's like to be an adolescent girl who comes into sexual and social power that she doesn't know what the heck to do with, it is a minor classic. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: If you're in search for a way to ogle Megan Fox's body, there are a lot better ways to do it than subjecting yourself to this. Read more

Richard Roeper, Richard Roeper.com: I'd like to see Jennifer get transferred to that "Twilight" school and stir up some trouble. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: There is within Diablo Cody the soul of an artist, and her screenplay brings to this material a certain edge, a kind of gleeful relish, that's uncompromising. This isn't your assembly-line teen horror thriller. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Director Karyn Kusama is torn between duty to female empowerment and slasher convention. But Fox shows a comic flair that Transformers never investigated. Read more

Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com: The movie substitutes calculation for brains, and the filmmakers seem to think we'll all be too stupid to notice. Read more

Dana Stevens, Slate: Kusama and Cody's collaboration is a wicked black comedy with unexpected emotional resonance, one of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year so far. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: It's a serviceable premise, but the execution fails on almost every level. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: You ought to have a movie that's both smart and sexy. But Jennifer's Body is neither. Most damning of all, it's not scary. Read more

Rick Groen, Globe and Mail: Apparently, there's nothing like lean and hungry times to awaken the undead. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: Jennifer's Body comes across as Diablo Cody lite, something she seems to have dashed off in-between talk show appearances and updating her MySpace page with her latest caustic witticisms. Read more

Mary F. Pols, TIME Magazine: [Its] depiction of the ways in which women like Needy are willing to compromise themselves to indulge an ultimately less secure friend is spot-on. Read more

Nigel Floyd, Time Out: By tapping in to the same vein of 'hormonal horror' as the excellent 'Ginger Snaps', this offers a witty, subversive look at the darker side of teen friendship. Read more

Christopher Orr, The New Republic: [T]here's something a bit sour about the whole enterprise, a lack of fun that becomes more evident as the injuries and indignities piled upon poor Needy accumulate, and gradually crowd out the film's early tongue-in-cheekiness. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: Jennifer's Body tries hard to be cool, gross and nasty but feels forced and misses the mark. Read more

Justin Chang, Variety: While not exactly lifeless, Jennifer's Body sure could be fresher. Read more

Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice: Jennifer's Body seems designed more to be quoted than watched. Read more