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A woman lands a dream job at a powerful tech company called the Circle, only to uncover an agenda that will affect the lives of all of humanity. A woman lands a dream job at a powerful tech company called the Circle, only to uncover an agenda that will affect the lives of all of humanity. A woman lands a dream job at a powerful tech company called the Circle, only to uncover an agenda that will affect the lives of all of humanity.

• James Ponsoldt
• Dave Eggers
• Emma Watson
• John Boyega
• 611 User reviews
• 259 Critic reviews
• 43 Metascore
• 4 wins & 1 nomination

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• (as Nicholas Valensi)

• (as Julian Von Nagel)

• (as Amie McCarthy-Winn)
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• Trivia Bill Paxton and Glenne Headly , who played the parents of Mae, both died the year of the film's release. Paxton died two months prior to the film's release on February 25 due to complications from heart surgery, and Headly died of a pulmonary embolism on June 8, less than two months after the film's release.
• Goofs When Mercer is being chased by the drone, there is a camera attached to both the driver and passenger window but in one shot on the bridge the driver-side window is rolled down.

[from trailer]

Eamon Bailey : Knowing is good, but knowing everything is better.

• Crazy credits A dedication to Bill Paxton at the closing credits which reads: "For Bill".
• Connections Featured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: John Oliver/Patton Oswalt/Tonight Showbotics/James Arthur (2017)
• Soundtracks Metal Guru Written by Marc Bolan Performed by T. Rex Courtesy of Spirit Music Group o/b/o Spirit Services Holdings, S.A.R.L.

User reviews 611

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• Jul 7, 2021
• How long is The Circle? Powered by Alexa
• April 28, 2017 (United States)
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• United States
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• Melinda's Song
• Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, USA
• Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $18,000,000 (estimated)
• $20,497,844
• Apr 30, 2017
• $40,656,399

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 50 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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The highlight of "The Circle" is producer-costar Tom Hanks ' performance as the CEO of the titular company, a Google- or Apple-styled high-tech octopus that's spreading its tentacles into every nook of our lives. The brilliance of Hanks' performance as Eamon Bailey, founder of The Circle, is that it's not remarkably different from the humble, charming average guy performance he gives as himself whenever he goes on talk shows, accepts awards, or narrates a documentary about the unsung heroes of World War II. For whatever reason, you can't help trusting Tom Hanks. That's why " The Simpsons Movie " cast him in a voice cameo selling "The New Grand Canyon," a name for the hole that would have been left in the ground if the military went through with its plan to bomb the recently contaminated town of Springfield into oblivion. "Hello, I'm Tom Hanks," he says. "The US government has lost its credibility, so it's borrowing some of mine."

The notion that Tom Hanks, a patriotic emblem right up there with apple pie and the American flag, would be hired to put a smiley face on an American Hiroshima is scarier than a lot of current horror films. You just know that if he ever used his considerable influence for evil rather than good, almost no one would resist him, and the handful that warned against him would not be believed. And yet Hanks has never played a straight-up bad guy who chills you to the bone whenever he shows up onscreen. The closest he's gotten to that sort of character was in "The Road to Perdition," where he played a mob hitman who was more of a morose antihero than a bad guy, and the " The Ladykillers ," a slapstick comedy that cast him as an obnoxious, bumbling Satan with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. His performance in "The Circle" as Evil Tom Hanks is the best thing in the picture.

That isn't saying much. James Ponsoldt's film based on Dave Eggers' same-titled 2013 book has a lot of good ideas and a few engrossing sequences, but it never quite finds a groove, or even a mode, and it ends in an abrupt, unsatisfying way. Emma Watson stars as Mae Holland, a young woman who gets a job at The Circle, a cult-like corporation based in the Bay Area that has a campus with man-made lakes and a sky filled with buzzing drones.

You probably have a good idea of where this story is going even if you've never read Eggers' book or seen an anti-tech warning tale before. Mae is handpicked by Eamon and his right-hand man, company co-founder Tom Stenton ( Patton Oswalt ), to take part in an experiment to glorify a new tiny camera they've invented. She'll wear cameras on herself and plant them all over her apartment and in other significant locations of her life and embrace the idea of "total transparency" hyped by her boss. "Transparency" and "integration" and other multi-syllable words get tossed around a lot by guys like Eamon, who are really interested in getting access to our data so they can monitor our lives, sell us new products, and resell our information to third parties. "The Circle" gets this and uses it to generate low-level paranoia in every scene, and amps it up whenever Eamon strides onstage to give one of his TED-talk styled addresses to the company or to unveil a groundbreaking new product (such as the tiny spherical cameras that Eamon distributes all over the world, giving the resultant Orwellian surveillance network a granola-crunching progressive label: SeeChange).

The problem is, "The Circle" never finds a good way to escalate its paranoia in anything other than a tedious, obvious way. And the meat-and-potatoes manner in which Ponsoldt has adapted and directed this material reveals the limits of his talent. A mad visionary stylist who paints with light and sound might've made a memorable film out of this story, but that's not the kind of director Ponsoldt is. He thrives in a low-key mode, telling stories of ordinary people interacting in ordinary spaces; "Off the Black," " Smashed " and especially " The Spectacular Now " were about as good as intimate character-driven indies could be, and " The End of the Tour " had its moments, too. There's a Hanks-like decency to the way he looks at human beings. 

But this story doesn't have many recognizable human beings in it. They're mostly plot functions with names. Watson's character is The Heroine, really more of a Gullible Ingenue. Glenne Headley and the late Bill Paxton are The Parents (Paxton shakes visibly because his character has multiple sclerosis). Hanks is the Villain, even though he doesn't play him that way, and Oswalt's character is the Scary Right Hand Man, sizing up Mae and pushing her back onto the beaten path whenever she's about to stray. Ellar Coltrane of " Boyhood " plays her ex-boyfriend Mercer, who warns her that The Circle is evil and that she's selling her privacy and her soul. Karen Gillan is The Friend who hires Mae to work for The Circle, only to become jealous and irritated when the founder selects Mae as the company's poster girl, then worried when the extent of Eamon's exploitation becomes apparent.

What I'm describing here is the cast of a horror movie that traffics in archetypal situations, one in which the characters don't have to be plausible human beings to rivet our attention and merit our sympathy. David Cronenberg and David Lynch , both of whom might've done a brilliant job with this same material, are aces at making films fueled by dream logic and filled with archetypal characters and images. (Just imagine what either of them could do with Oswalt, a reliably excellent comic character actor who unexpectedly radiates power and menace here.) Ponsoldt does not appear, on the basis of this film, to be that sort of director, and that sort of director is what "The Circle" needed. This movie might represent the least sensible match of filmmaker and material since Sidney Lumet adapted " The Wiz ."

As you watch the film, the subdued performances, realistic-looking locations and active-but-not-baroque camerawork make you expect a more realistic film about tech, along the lines of " The Social Network " or " Steve Jobs ." When the story turns into something akin to a nightmarish cousin of " The Truman Show " or " Network ," or the kid sister of Cronenbeg's "ExistenZ," you want it to get bigger, wilder, more outrageous, more frightening, and it's too nice and reasonable and conscientious to do that. The result feels undernourished in just about every way, although Hanks's performance, John Boyega's brief role as a founding programmer, and a couple of frightening action sequences break through the tedium. This is one of those movies that has nothing and everything wrong with it. It's frustrating in a singular way.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

The Circle (2017)

Rated PG-13 for a sexual situation, brief strong language and some thematic elements including drug use.

Emma Watson as Mae Holland

Tom Hanks as Eamon Bailey

John Boyega as Kalden

Karen Gillan as Annie Allerton

Ellar Coltrane as Mercer Medeiros

Patton Oswalt as Tom Stenton

Bill Paxton as Mae's Father

Glenne Headly as Mae's Mother

Poorna Jagannathan as Dr. Jessica Villalobos

Ellen Wong as Renata

Nate Corddry as Dan

• James Ponsoldt

Writer (based on the novel by)

• Dave Eggers

Cinematographer

• Matthew Libatique
• Lisa Lassek
• Franklin Peterson
• Danny Elfman

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'The Circle': A movie review for the tech literate

Is Tom Hanks playing Zuck, @jack or Jobs? "The Circle" serves as a cautionary tale for mainstream audiences but probably won't surprise the tech savvy.

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As "The Circle" envisions it, technology's dystopian near-future is already here.

The movie, which opened Friday in the US, imagines a world where the mightiest tech company cajoles us to willingly abandon privacy. As the megacorp embarks on moonshots to promote democracy, protect human rights and provide digital convenience on steroids, a few characters suspect it's covering up sinister motives, like crushing adversaries or accumulating wealth.

No . Freaking . Way .

Don't fault the filmmakers if that revelation feels tame. The objective of a tech thriller shouldn't be an award for peering most presciently into our digital downfall. For mainstream viewers, "The Circle" likely provides an entertaining critique of where tech could take us. But to the tech savvy, many of the movie's dark prognostications feel pretty familiar.

The upside? Tech geeks can still relish playing "Where's Waldo?" for real-life tech references.

Emma Watson plays Mae in "The Circle."

In "The Circle," "Harry Potter" vet Emma Watson plays Mae, a young woman rescued from the drudgery of temp jobs when she's hired at the Circle, the world's most progressive tech company.

After one of the Circle's products saves her life, the company's leader, played by Tom Hanks, recruits Mae for an experimental project. She's the first person to "go transparent," sharing and broadcasting every facet of her life, save for three-minute breaks to the toilet.

Dave Eggers, the author of the 2013 novel on which the movie is based, has trumpeted how little he researched Silicon Valley , but director James Ponsoldt took the opposite approach. He and his crew visited tech campuses and consulted experts to capture the industry's culture.

"It's present-day science fiction," Anthony Bregman, one of the producers of "The Circle," said in an interview on the red carpet for the film's premiere Wednesday night at the Tribeca Film Festival. Just this month, he said, live broadcasts of homicides on Facebook felt eerily true to the world of the movie, in which a character's death is streamed live.

Real-life tech references in the movie aren't meant as veiled accusations.

Hanks' Eamon Bailey, for example, is the company's "public-facing visionary." Earlier this week, Hanks joked with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about playing a diabolical tech genius with a beard. "I played you! I'm not in as good of shape, I didn't exercise or eat as well, but I played you," he said.

These tablets aren't iPads.

But Bailey isn't channeling a single tech figure. He also has the onstage persona of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (down to employees taking snapshots with aluminum-colored tablets adorned by glowing white logos). Bailey's proclamations about the Circle curing all disease and unlocking human potential could have been cribbed from the News Feed posts of Facebook leader Mark Zuckerberg.

Sometimes the movie uses ambiguity to keep the audience asking questions. In the climax, Mae turns the Circle's facade of transparency against its leaders. In doing so, she pulls a Julian Assange, but the movie leaves it ambiguous whether she is more akin to the Nobel-peace-prize-nominated WikiLeaks circa 2010 or the presidential-campaign-meddling WikiLeaks of 2016.

On the nose

Other actors in the film drew from specific points of reference. Actress Karen Gillan used reports about Amazon to better understand her character, Annie. A longtime friend of Mae, Annie is part of the Circle's executive elite, delivering inhuman productivity.

To get inside Annie's head, Gillan relied on a New York Times 2015 expose about Amazon , she said. That report was criticized by the company and the Times' public editor as unfair, but the portrait of an unforgiving tech giant with intense employee expectations helped Gillan understand Annie's breaking point. "That was quite similar in the Circle, especially with my character, who is on a lot of Adderall all the time just trying to stay awake," she said.

Even when one of the references is on-the-nose, the filmmakers demur. The Circle's campus design, for example, will look familiar to anyone who has seen aerial renderings of the Apple "spaceship" headquarters .

"Whether anybody is accusing Apple of the same ambition [as the Circle], that's not for me to say," Bregman, the producer, said. (Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon didn't respond to messages seeking comment.)

The Circle campus isn't Apple's "spaceship" headquarters. It's just a circle. Get it?

Still, for tech geeks, half the fun of "The Circle" is playing spot-the-tech-reference, such as:

• Mae's Luddite ex-boyfriend, Mercer, turning on his phone to death threats sparked by Mae's naive social-media posting. ( Justine Sacco could relate .)
• "Dream Friday" all-hands meetings that Bailey holds weekly with his Circle workforce. ( The Circle publicly broadcasting some of these meetings would never fly at Facebook .)
• Ingestible biometric sensors. ( Check. )
• Mae's tipsy ride home on a Circle shuttle bus. ( Join me in remembering the Google Bus protests of 2013 .)
• An employee casually mentioning a Circle project to track children via microchips in their bones. ( We're not there yet but close .)
• The Circle's "Group of 40" elite employees. (Apple at least accepts 100 and takes them on a field trip .)

"The Circle" doesn't get everything right. At times, a superficial understanding about the internet -- a criticism of the book -- seeps through to the movie as well. Characters throw out terms like "in the cloud" similar to how your uncle who wears a hip-holster for his phone might. It's smart-sounding tech shorthand but is applied in contexts that don't make precise sense.

Lessons learned?

To our society's credit, when abuse by tech giants comes to light, we generally respond with outrage rather than the indifference of "The Circle." But at the premiere during an audience Q&A, Hanks related his own lesson from the film, while satirizing how we can mock the behavior of movie characters only to live out the same actions ourselves.

"When you see someone on stage in front of a great group of people being incredibly charming, do not trust that man!" he warned. Ever the showman, Hanks strutted back and forth, ironically enacting the exact behavior he railed against.

And the audience ate it up, with laughter and applause.

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The other side of the red carpet: A peek inside the madness

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Review: In ‘The Circle,’ Click Here if You Think You’re Being Watched

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By Glenn Kenny

• April 27, 2017

From the drab 1995 cyberthriller “The Net” onward, mainstream American movies have been hard-pressed to pertinently weigh in on the internet and its discontents. Yes, comedies are regularly larded with “old folks can’t tweet” and “these darn kids and their ‘texting’” jokes, while espionage thrillers invariably serve up hot webcam action. But few pictures attempt to take a hard look at what it all means — perhaps because the entertainment business has some resentment about its digital usurpation.

So credit “The Circle” with ambition, at least. This film, directed by James Ponsoldt, is an adaptation of Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel, and the two collaborated on the screenplay. Mr. Eggers’s book is both a satire and a cautionary tale, grafting surveillance-state mechanisms to a faux-progressive vision with pronounced cult leanings — a lot of its “join us” vibe feels passed down from Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” a tale set, like the one here, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mr. Ponsoldt’s movie begins with its heroine, Mae (Emma Watson), trapped in a stale cubicle doing meaningless dunning labor for a meaningless company; in due time, she’s doing much more high-tech “customer experience” work at the Circle, an internet service that seems to meld all the most annoying features of Google, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. Adding to the forced-extroversion fun is a new invention, a multipurpose webcam that’s the relative size and shape of an eyeball. “Knowing is good but knowing everything is better,” crows one of the company’s principals, a Steve Jobs-like visionary named Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks).

That maxim also appears in the novel, and it sticks in the craw, not least because any first-year graduate student in philosophy could demolish it. At what point did the Circle put a hiring freeze on anyone conversant with epistemology? Lampooning the simple-mindedness of utopian web clichés was arguably part of Mr. Eggers’s point, but much of that point is often muddled in the book. And it’s simply incoherent in the movie. The novel is at its most trenchantly funny when depicting the exhausting nature of virtual social life, and it’s in this area, too, that the movie gets its very few knowing laughs. But it’s plain, not much more than 15 minutes in, that without the story’s paranoid aspects you’re left with a conceptual framework that’s been lapped three times over by the likes of, say, the Joshua Cohen novel “Book of Numbers,” or the HBO comedy series “Silicon Valley.”

Movie Review: 'The Circle'

The times critic glenn kenny reviews “the circle.”.

“The Circle” is based on the Dave Eggers novel of the same name about a woman whose new job at a Google-like company consumes her life. In his review Glenn Kenny writes: Lampooning the simple-mindedness of utopian web-speak is a point that was often muddled in Eggers’s book, and incoherent in the movie. The film was also left with oodles and oodles of bad acting and bad dialogue. Emma Watson’s character spends way too much screen time looking concerned while looking at other screens. Ellar Coltrane can’t find any footing in the role of the Mr. Integrity ex-boyfriend. Tom Hanks lays on an idea of avuncular visionary charm, and doesn’t have much to do beyond that. And John Boyega plays a key character in the book that’s been reconfigured for the movie so that his function makes literally no sense.

You’re also left with oodles and oodles of bad acting and bad dialogue. Ms. Watson has to spend way too much time looking concerned while staring at various screens. Ellar Coltrane, who was so unaffectedly appealing as he grew up onscreen in Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” can’t find any footing in the role of Mae’s Mr. Integrity ex-boyfriend. It doesn’t help that he has to mouth lines like “We used to go on adventures and have fun and see things, and you were brave and exciting.”

Mr. Hanks evokes an idea of avuncular visionary charm, and doesn’t have much to do beyond that. And John Boyega — playing a character who was vital in the book but whose role has been reconfigured so that his function in the movie makes no sense — mostly stands around at the rear of auditoriums, backlit, and when called upon to speak does a very creditable Denzel Washington impersonation.

The movie is dedicated to Bill Paxton, who died in February and is quite fine in the small role of Mae’s father, who’s dealing with multiple sclerosis. The dedication is a kind and considerate touch. Still, if you’d like to enjoy a movie featuring both Mr. Paxton and Mr. Hanks, I’d recommend “Apollo 13.”

A film review on Friday about “The Circle,” an adaptation of the Dave Eggers novel, misstated the year the book was released. It was 2013, not 2014.

How we handle corrections

The Circle Rated PG-13 for language. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

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Film Review: ‘The Circle’

A shrewdly ominous corporate thriller about the death of privacy in the digital age is, at last, a movie that fingers the proper culprits — namely, us.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ The Circle ” is a swankly sinister little mind teaser of a thriller. It’s a nightmare vision of what digital culture is turning all of us into, with all of our help. The movie, adapted from Dave Eggers ‘ 2013 novel and directed by James Ponsoldt (“The End of the Tour”), is about a corporation called The Circle that stores massive amounts of data — financial, medical, social, personal — about each of the account holders who belong to it. The company, based in the Bay Area, knows everything there is to know about you — but it’s all for your own convenience! You could call “The Circle” a dystopian thriller, yet it’s not the usual boilerplate sci-fi about grimly abstract oppressors lording it over everyone else. The movie is smarter and creepier than that; it’s a cautionary tale for the age of social-media witch hunts and compulsive oversharing. The fascist digital future the movie imagines is darkly intriguing to contemplate, because one’s main thought about it is how much of that future is already here.

Mae Holland ( Emma Watson ) is an eager, lively, somewhat unsure-of-herself office drone who is lucky enough, through her friend Annie (Karen Gillan), to snag an entry-level job as a “customer experience” manager on the campus of The Circle. It’s one of those super-energized youth-cult work environments — think Amazon meets Apple meets Facebook — where selling what the company stands for is built into every interaction. Early on, Mae attends her first Dream Friday, the weekly corporate pep rally in which Eamon Bailey ( Tom Hanks ), the company’s co-founder and guru, gets up on stage to point out how everything that’s good for The Circle is good for the world. Hanks, warm and youthful in dark hair and a gray beard, plays Bailey with a disarmingly friendly, Steve Jobs–meets–Tony Robbins happy-talk authoritarian boosterism.

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On Mae’s first Dream Friday, Bailey introduces a shiny round synthetic camera, scarcely bigger than a marble, that can be attached to any surface. A live feed of that environment will then come right onto your computer screen. It’s very NSA — which is to say, nothing we haven’t already contemplated in the age of high surveillance.

But then Mae, after several days on the job, gets visited at her desk by a couple of co-workers, and that’s when the real creepiness starts to play with her head. They tell her that she has already fallen behind on her social media, that she’s not sharing enough with the “community.” She is, they say, the most “mysterious” person at the company (because she’s failed to reveal every last thing about herself). They know that her father (played, in his final role, by the late Bill Paxton) has MS, but didn’t she know that the company offers a support group for children of MS sufferers? They also point out that Mae didn’t come into work over the weekend (but, they hasten to add, that’s okay, it’s not required , though it didn’t go unnoticed), and that she would do well to keep up on her unanswered community work messages, which now number 8,000. It’s all for her own good, of course. It’s so that she can connect .

In nearly every corporate thriller, the ominous bosses are the bad guys, and the workers, with one or two back-stabbing exceptions, are the victims of their malfeasance. “The Circle” presents an altogether different — and more insightful — anatomy of corporate power. Everything The Circle does fulfills a “progressive” agenda. And the bad guys are now us: the proletarian communicators.

At a work party, Mae learns that the company has devised a system to protect children from predators by implanting chips in their bones. When she laughs, in disbelief, that this could be happening, the coworker who tells her about it mentions that it’s “reducing kidnapping, rape, and murder by 99 percent.” (If you object to the idea of implanting chips in children, then it puts you on the side of defending those things.) A politician running for Congress gives a speech to the Circle members, pledging total transparency: She will make every last one of her phone calls and e-mails available. It’s the “liberal” vision of political honesty.

But, of course, what all this is doing is eliminating privacy — and, more than that, downgrading privacy to an archaic concept. “The Circle” is Dave Eggers’ variation on “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in which Big Brother has become the compulsion of ordinary citizens to make public — and relinquish control over — their space, their lives, their selves. How far does the film go into the new consciousness? Far enough to make the principal culprit…the heroine.

Mae is recruited by Bailey and his partner (Patton Oswalt, as the compleat weasel) to become a company advocate, and before long she has embraced the cult of “transparency,” volunteering to wear a micro-camera 24/7 and turn her life into a YouTube-style reality series: “Big Brother” meets “The Truman Show.” (Ponsoldt and Eggers, who co-wrote the script, provide a witty jaded array of pop-up troll comments in on-line bubbles.) Emma Watson makes this convincing, because she gives Mae a desire to be liked that turns her cheerleading for the new technocratic agenda into something uniquely validating. She wins followers, the love of her coworkers, the approval of her bosses — and through it all she fills the hole in her soul with a new way of “connecting.” The company, in turn, gets a new way to control everyone under the sun.

“The Circle” has an elegant and original look, all sleek techno business clutter, and given its star wattage, it’s a good enough movie to find a niche in the marketplace. Watson, who’s at the center of nearly every scene, is a serious actress who proves that she can hold a film together with the force of her personality.

Yet a movie where the heroine, in her ambiguous innocence, goes over to the dark side of corporate power is not necessarily a movie you can warm up to. “The Circle” is a fascinating but chilly parable, a film for the head rather than the heart (or any place lower). It’s a bit of a thesis drama; its driving passion it to warn us about how a surveillance society will work. Mae gets up on stage to demonstrate that anyone on earth can be located in 20 minutes. She starts with a wanted killer (it’s queasy to see even that person readily apprehended), then moves on to her non-techie best friend (Ellar Coltrane, the star of “Boyhood”), whose pursuit by cell-phone camera and highway mini-drone plays like a scene out of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” “The Circle” is so clinical in its paranoia that it doesn’t hit many emotional buttons, but it’s the rare conversation-piece thriller that asks its audience: What sort of society do you really want? The movie shows us what it looks like when people have been convinced to share so much of themselves that they no longer have any selves left.

Reviewed at Tribeca Film Festival, April 26, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 110 MIN.

• Production: An STX Entertainment release of an Image Nation Abu Dhabi, Likely Story, Playtone, Route One Entertainment prod. Producers: Anthony Bregman, Gary Goetzman, James Ponsoldt. Executive producers: Stefanie Azpiazu, Peter Cron, Evan Hayes, Russell Levine, Federica Sainte-Rose, Ron Schmidt, Steve Shareshian, Marc Shmuger, Sally Willcox.
• Crew: Director: James Ponsoldt. Screenplay: Ponsoldt, Dave Eggers. Camera (color, widescreen): Matthew Libatique. Editors: Lisa Lassek, Franklin Peterson.
• With: Tom Hanks, Emma Watson, John Boyega, Karel Gillan, Ellar Coltrane, Patton Oswalt, Glenne Headly, Bill Paxton.

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The Circle Review: A Sledgehammer Satire of Social Media

Emma Watson and Tom Hanks fall flat in The Circle, a dull exercise in the evils of Big Brother.

Cover your webcam, muffle your cellphone, you're not paranoid, they really are watching you. Welcome to the world depicted in The Circle , a sledgehammer satire of privacy and pesonal freedom. The film puts a bullseye on the Big Brother reach of companies like Google and Facebook. The ideals and concerns presented are valid, but the execution is overdone and blase. We get the message. It's delivered via firehose.

Emma Watson stars as Mae Holland, a customer service rep struggling to get by. Her best friend, Annie (Karen Gillan), gets her a job at The Circle , a behemoth internet company that has pioneered social media. It's charismatic CEO, Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks), belts out tech breakthroughs and wisdom to the cult-like employees a la Steve Jobs. Mae at first struggles to fit into the ultra-connected corporate culture. But personal issues at home and with a childhood friend (Ellar Coltrane) soon has her drinking the Kool-Aid as well. It's not until a chance meeting with a mysterious coworker ( John Boyega ) does Mae truly grasp the power of the company.

The Circle spends a lot of time making pointed barbs at the culture of Silicon Valley. We get the earnest millenials slaving away at a cheery compound. Resplendent with ping pong tables, pool, yoga classes, dorms; all of the accoutrements needed to work twenty hour days. These initial scenes, especially the dialogue from the worker bee clones, are humorous. The gag loses its luster quickly as the plot progresses. We are meant to believe that ostensibly intelligent people, able to create algorithms and advanced tech, are lemmings when it comes to privacy issues. It's entirely unbelievable after a point. The film then drags considerably as we're preached to like the sheep it mocks.

The Circle is co-written by Dave Eggers, the author of the 2013 novel the film is based on. This one is a headscratcher as the script is mundane. It plays out very slowly and in a ham-fisted way. It could be that the novel has similar beats and is just being recreated. I've never read the book, so can't make that judgment. It's just intriguing, and a rarity, that the original writer's script is so boring.

The characters in the film are completely unbelievable. Some, like the Tom Hanks ceo, are meant to be caricatures. The others fall flat in their intelligence and naivete. I can buy a girl being impressed by a new job, but not much else that Mae does. Emma Watson cries and croons, but her actions are nonsensical. The why, especially after the film's climactic event, is totally illogical. The Circle takes what should be a lucid character and boxes her into the overly satirical plot.

Privacy issues, surveillance, the ability to be off the grid, we've seen these themes tackled before in far superior films. It's 2017, Orwell's 1984 is decades past. The average social media user is keenly aware of its dangers. The Circle isn't telling or showing us anything new in this regard. It needed to be faster paced and more entertaining. From STX Pictures, The Circle is a dull and bloated exercise in technology's overreach .

‘The Circle’ Review: Torn-From-Headlines Tech Thriller Is Cinematic Dead Link

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

What we have here is one of those up-to-the-minute attacks on Internet atrocities that stopped being up-to-the-minute the second co-writer Dave Eggers, on whose 2013 novel The Circle is based, finished the script and hit “send.” Fact trumps (I use the verb advisedly) fiction everywhere these days, especially with Congress giving Web providers a free hand to sell every little thing they know about us. What this movie needed was the satiric depth-charge of a Stanley Kubrick in his Dr. Strangelove period, a sort of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb that Exploded My Privacy. Instead, the director leading the attack here is James Ponsoldt, a sure hand at character-driven pieces ( Smashed, The Spectacular Now, The End of the Tour ), but a novice at doing more than tsk-tsk–ing in the face of digital Armageddon. It’s a paranoid thriller without suspense, urgency or a single new thing to say.

The story? It’s basically Beauty ( Emma Watson ) versus the Beast ( Tom Hanks ), with zero chance of the former reforming the latter. Watson, her brow perpetually furrowed, plays Mae Holland, a wage slave who finds nirvana when she punches in at the Circle, a corporate entity run by sweet-talking tech guru Eamon Bailey, played Hanks at his most charmingly benign. Hanks and Eggers collaborated with similar lackluster results in last year’s A Hologram for the King ; no one could doubt their good intentions, but the roads they keep taking us on still leads to movie hell.

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Watson struggles to keep us in Mae’s corner. She has her suspicions that everything isn’t all rainbows and stock options. What’s all the fuss when Bailey and his partner ( Patton Oswalt in full sleaze mode) fret, nicely, that Mae isn’t working on weekends? Or that their new employee isn’t taking advantage of the company’s program for children of MS sufferers (Mae’s father, played by the late, great Bill Paxton in his final film role , has the disease.) Other actors hover around – Boyhood ‘s Ellar Coltrane as Mae’s best friend and Star Wars hunk John Boyega as a mystery informant – but don’t amount to much. The supposed “gasp” moment is when Mae drinks the Kool Aid and agrees to wear a tiny dot of a camera that feeds her every action (bathroom breaks excepted) to a computer screen. Total transparency. That’s the golden calf for millennials.

There’s a theme being toyed with here, about how we the people are contributing to our own exploitation. But the reveal is as retro as the first smartphone. The Circle feels dull, dated and ripped from yesterday’s headlines. It flatlines while you’re watching it.

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‘The Circle’: 5 Reasons Why Tom Hanks and Emma Watson’s Movie Bombed

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Nobody sets out to make a bad movie. So why did cautionary tech thriller “ The Circle ” — adapted by lauded writer-director James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now,” “The End of the Tour”) and beloved novelist Dave Eggers from his own 2013 bestseller — earn such negative reviews ( 43 on Metacritic , 17 on Rotten Tomatoes ) and bomb at the  box office ($9.3 million in 3,163 theaters)?

The movie went wrong in five significant ways.

1. The movie was foreign financed.

“The Circle” was developed by A-list ex-DreamWorks producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald’s Parkes+MacDonald Image Nation, which raised financing from Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ and foreign sales company FilmNation on the power of Tom Hanks , who was the first star on board via his Playtone banner.

In order to raise an $18-million budget, globally bankable star Emma Watson was cast in a central leading role that demanded she be in every scene. Veering in tone from satiric comedy to naturalistic drama, “The Circle” follows wide-eyed Mae Holland’s swift rise within a burgeoning Silicon Valley tech company (imagine Facebook and Google combined; the campus resembles Apple’s new headquarters).   The film is told from her perspective, and required a far more charismatic actress. We lose sympathy for Mae as the narrative omits vital connective tissue that might explain just how and why she becomes a willing tool of The Circle.

Watson was a key member of the ensembles in the blockbuster Harry Potter series and worldwide musical smash “Beauty and the Beast,” which solidified her global stardom. While she sagged in non-crucial roles in “My Week with Marilyn” and “The Bling Ring,” she was well cast in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Clearly, Watson can shine with the right director, but “The Circle” required too much of her. With Ponsoldt’s prior actresses Mary Elizabeth Winstead or Shailene Woodley in the role, the movie might have turned out much better — even on a smaller budget.

Hanks does not help matters in an overinflated supporting role as the amiably villainous co-founder of The Circle. He’s too big for the room; his familiar stardom is distracting. And charismatic John Boyega is wasted as a mysterious Circle co-founder. We want more of him every time he comes on screen, but he just fades back into the shadows.

2. “The Circle” is a feathered fish.

The movie is neither the sort of smart and edgy indie that A24 could market, nor a glossily entertaining commercial studio vehicle. It doesn’t appeal directly to younger Watson fans or older Hanks fans. “The Circle” therefore satisfies neither critics nor mainstream audiences. It’s what industry insiders like to call a ‘tweener.

3. EuropaCorp and STX Entertainment partnered on a too-familiar movie.

Luc Besson’s French distribution company EuropaCorp picked up “The Circle” for $8 million and partnered with STX for the North American release. They spent serious marketing dollars chasing after the hard-to-reach 17-to-35 demo, but the movie looked too familiar. Back in 1995, even “The Net” starring Sandra Bullock did a better job of painting a paranoid techno-future where everyone is watched. So did Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show” in 1998 — and most effectively of all, the hit Channel 4 series “Black Mirror.”

As our own Eric Kohn pointed out in his review :

Recent years have seen a proliferation of deep-dive narratives on the information age, from the psychological thriller territory of ‘Mr. Robot’ to the parodic extremes of ‘Silicon Valley. Ponsoldt’s project is stuck in between those two extremes. On the one hand, it’s an Orwellian drama about surveillance society; at the same time, it’s a sincere workplace drama about young adulthood that shoehorns in some techno-babble for the sake of deepening its potential.

4. Dave Eggers is box-office poison.

As a novelist, Eggers has delivered such bestsellers as “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” “Zeitoun,” and “A Hologram for the King,” which also was turned into a movie starring Hanks that earned mild reviews and poor box office ($7.7 million domestic). His brand of ironic, self-referential satire works better on the page, where the writer can control the tone.

As a Hollywood screenwriter, Eggers adapted Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic “Where the Wild Things Are” for Spike Jonze, a well-reviewed  but expensive ($115 million) 2009 Warner Bros. box office dud ($99 million worldwide). He and his wife Vendela Vida also wrote 2009 family comedy “Away We Go,” directed by Sam Mendes and starring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, which also earned mild reviews  and piddling box office ($10 million worldwide). Gus Van Sant’s 2012 drama “Promised Land,” starring Krasinski and Matt Damon and based on Eggers’ story, fared no better on Metacritic or at the box office ($9.3 million worldwide).

5. Expectations were high for writer-director James Ponsoldt.

Having delivered well-reviewed indie features his first four times at bat —  “Off the Black,”   “Smashed,” “The Spectacular Now” and “The End of the Tour” — Ponsoldt was on a roll. Critics expected more from “The Circle,” and meted out harsh disapproval. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, for one, awarded the film one star out of four: “‘The Circle’ feels dull, dated and ripped from yesterday’s headlines. It flatlines while you’re watching it.”

Next up: Ponsoldt is writing “Wild City,” an original idea for Disney that could give him an even bigger budget. Let’s hope he regains his once-sure footing.

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Review by Brian Eggert April 28, 2017

In the eighteenth century, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a prison called the Panopticon. Designed in a circular structure with a single inspection tower at the center, the prison’s guards sat in the tower, watching the inmates in the inner perimeter of the circle that was lined with cells. Bentham’s belief was that people—in this case, inmates—behave better when observed, and due to a clever masking of the guard tower, the inmates of a Panopticon never know when they’re being watched. As a result, Bentham theorized, the prison inmates would be well behaved. Although Bentham designs were never put into practice, not exactly, the same basic principle is the driving force of The Circle , although in place of a prison, social media remains the ever-watchful eye observing your every move.

Dave Eggers adapts his own novel alongside co-writer and director James Ponsoldt ( The Spectacular Now , The End Of The Tour ), delivering a film that functions like a world-upside-down episode of Black Mirror , except less edgy. It involves a Google-like company called The Circle, whose ubiquitous “TrueYou” sign-on gets users access to a digital world of connectivity. Everything in The Circle is about sharing and building both digital and real communities—and if you’re not connected, there’s clearly something wrong with you. It’s headed by the company’s Steve Jobs-like co-founder Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks), who holds Friday meetings to unveil the latest product launch. Employees watch Bailey preach about The Circle’s newest thing, all of them laughing a little too hard at his bad jokes, being a little too impressed with the latest innovation, not pointing out some gross violations of human privacy, and shouting “sharing is caring” without irony.

Enter Mae (Emma Watson), a customer service temp whose friend (Karen Gillan) lands her an interview at The Circle. Mae gets the job, and she soon finds herself in The Circle’s world of mandatory fun and biometric trackers that are sneakily fed to unsuspecting employees. Nevertheless, Mae seems just fine with drinking the Kool-Aid, despite warning signs and invasions of privacy all around. For instance, her fellow employees instantly know about her parents (Glenne Headly, the late Bill Paxton in his final role) managing her dad’s MS. The Circle’s community also shames Mae’s childhood friend Mercer (Ellar Coltrane, from Boyhood ) as a “deer killer,” forcing him into seclusion after she posts a photo of his homemade antler chandelier. Mercer attempts to be the voice of reason, suggesting that real face-to-face connections are preferable over The Circle’s false community, but then Mercer is an underwritten device-of-a-character. And Mae seems to get the message, especially when The Circle’s other co-founder (John Boyega) voices his disdain with the company’s direction under Bailey.

The viewer might suspect that Mae will teach everyone a valuable lesson about the importance of internet privacy. After all, early in the film, she kayaks alone to a secluded spot and cries—not the actions of someone who always wants to be connected. But then later, there comes a kayak-centric turn, and the film leaves no one worth rooting for. After a chat with Bailey and his corporate-stooge partner (Patton Oswalt), Mae publicly professes that “secrets are lies” and thus privacy should be abolished. She agrees to go “transparent” and resolves, without reservation, to submit her life, phone calls, and emails for open public consumption online. Think The Truman Show in an already Orwellian world, where Mae’s millions of followers constantly troll her every action or live vicariously through her. Of course, she soon learns the downfalls of a company capable of controlling its billions of users; however, it’s not enough to sway her newfound views on rampant online sharing and the control—over, say, political elections—that affords.

In the end (spoilers ahead), the message of The Circle feels muddled. Unlike an episode of the aforementioned Black Mirror , the film’s lesson is not quite apparent. There are two options: 1) the film presents an allegory for how social media has saturated the world and presents a critique of that trend, sacrificing its protagonist in the process; 2) the film sides with Mae, who ostensibly gets the bad guys in the end, but who also determines to eliminate privacy because, in essence, the internet doesn’t kill people, people kill people . So as Mae resolves to expose the world to The Circle’s limitless observation and connectivity, some might feel imprisoned in a Panopticon; others might feel encouraged and supported by the digital connections made to billions of users across the planet.

Ponsoldt delivers a polished production, as production designer Gerald Sullivan gives us a futureworld that looks about six months away from becoming a reality, while cinematographer Matthew Libatique ( Iron Man , Chi-Raq ) offers a series of long, fluid Steadicam shots that keep the material visually active. Ponsoldt and Eggers also saturate every scene after Mae’s “transparency” with a barrage of pop-ups and random comments from her followers, and the effect becomes tiresome after a few minutes. (We’re left wondering how it wouldn’t be tiresome after hours, days, weeks, etc.) The Circle boasts a lot of talented actors, such as Hanks, who uses his endless charm in a rare, if convincing bad guy role. But the film never delves into a thorough consideration of its concept; and what’s more, the story lacks a narrative thrust to support its otherwise neat ideas. The result feels rather empty, while its lack of a strong conclusion or stance robs the viewer of a more tangible lesson.

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The Circle Parent Guide

This tale of a “big brother” who is watching you fails to create engagement or suspense..

Mae Holland (Emma Watson) thinks she is the luckiest person alive when she lands the job of her dreams at a high-tech company called the Circle. But as she moves into the immersive environment of the new workplace, she finds her privacy beginning to disappear. Soon she is wondering if the communal philosophy may not be her worst nightmare.

Release date April 28, 2017

Run Time: 109 minutes

Official Movie Site

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by donna gustafson.

Have you ever noticed how some movies have trailers that turn out to be better than the actual film? That is definitely the case with this one. The promotional footage for The Circle will likely remind viewers of George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four . Sadly, this tale of a “Big Brother” who is watching you fails to create the same kind of engagement or suspense.

In the 2017 story, Mae Holland (Emma Watson) is delighted to trade her cubical job for an exciting opportunity at a high-tech corporation called “The Circle”. Mimicking real-life Apple , the movie features a character named Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks) who is the founder of the organization. He walks the stage each week, introducing the company’s latest products to his crowd of adoring employees. He also preaches the ideology of a transparent society, where the collection of data and camera images will hold people accountable for their actions – and hence create a responsible community of human beings.

As Mae becomes more embedded in her work community (or the community becomes more embedded in her), she fails to heed cautions from outsiders, like her mom (Glenne Headly) and high school friend (Ellar Coltrane). And when she starts getting recognition from Eamon Bailey himself, she even turns a deaf ear to the concerns of co-workers such as her buddy Annie (Karen Gillan) who is burning out from job stress, or the software’s original developer Ty (John Boyega) who is disheartened by the way his invention is being used.

And that’s about that same point my sympathy tuned out. If the main character can’t hear the warnings from her parents about giving up her privacy, or see the problems with handing over her agency to an all-powerful corporation that has no restrictions on how they use such information or power, how are young audiences supposed to see the dangers of Mae’s situation? This alarming message is combined with the approval of throwing one’s personal life onto the internet to be judged by the whims of the anonymous public. The film also includes mild and moderate profanity, social drinking, a married couple caught on camera while engaged in sex, and depictions of bullying that lead to tragic consequences.

The production fails from an artistic point of view too. The plot is tedious and neglects opportunities to explore characters’ motives. The performances seem forced and overbearing. Considering the increasing amount of surveillance happening in our modern society, there really were many facets the script could have explored. Instead it assumes, anticlimactically, that the invasion of privacy is a trend that can’t be stopped. For those concerned about such issues, the unbalanced perspective presented here will be one that is hard to swallow.

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The circle rating & content info.

Why is The Circle rated PG-13? The Circle is rated PG-13 by the MPAA for a sexual situation, brief strong language and some thematic elements including drug use.

Violence: A character, without a life jacket, paddles a kayak and is tossed into the ocean when the boat capsizes. Characters break minor rules and trespass. Some mild teasing, public shaming and serious bullying are portrayed. Police tackle and handcuff a fugitive. Citizens harass a private individual. A car chase leads to an accident, and fatalities occur. Mob mentality and incitement are depicted. Personal privacy is violated. Characters are suspected of selfish and/or malicious motives.

Sexual Content: A married couple engage in sexual activity, and are shown in bed together with the woman straddling the man. When images of this event are shown on the internet, some sexual discussion ensues. Other sexual references and innuendo are heard.

Profanity: The sexual expletive is used once in a non-sexual context. The script includes infrequent use of scatological slang, mild and moderate profanity, crude words and terms of deity.

Alcohol / Drug Use: Characters often drink alcohol at social events and backyard gatherings. Some medical procedures are shown and medication is ingested.

Page last updated August 1, 2017

The Circle Parents' Guide

The character Eamon Bailey (played by Tom Hanks) uses a lot of arguments to convince his audience that his company is trying to protect humanity. In what ways does he feel the accumulation of all knowledge will be a benefit to society? Why does he think the collection of personal and public data will make people more accountable? Why does he fail to mention who will use the information or make the judgements? What ulterior motives do you think he may have?

At some points in the movie, Mae seems concerned about her personal information, but later becomes very comfortable with sharing it. What do you think influences her feelings? What benefits does she get from being transparent? How does Eamon Bailey use her motives to the company’s advantage? Why do you think Mae is willing to overlook the tragic consequences some of her friends and family face because of the lack of privacy, and continue to be part of The Circle?

In the script, the characters conclude that secrets are lies. Do you agree? Is there ever a good reason to keep something confidential? Are there times when full disclosure can cause harm? What would happen if all political decisions (such as military strategies, financial negations or committee discussions) were made available for all to hear? Is the general public informed enough to weigh in on all topics? What might happen if some of the information was misunderstood and created a mob reaction?

News About "The Circle"

The Circle is based on the novel by Dave Eggers .

The most recent home video release of The Circle movie is August 1, 2017. Here are some details…

Home Video Notes: The Circle Release Date: 1 August 2017 The Circle releases to home video (Blu-ray/Digital Copy) with the following special features: - No More Secrets: Completing The Circle — A Four-Part Series - The Future Won’t Wait: Design and Technology - A True Original: Remembering Bill Paxton

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Please, Somebody, Put Me in The Circle

By Estelle Tang

Honestly, I got into The Circle because I thought it would be the perfect trash. Early adopters enthused about the Netflix reality show, describing it as an influencer popularity contest with shades of Catfish . The first season sees eight contestants each sealed up in their own apartment, not permitted to communicate with each other (or anyone else) via any medium apart from an online network called The Circle. The prize is $100,000; the aim is to become the most popular user via regular rankings.

The Circle ’s network combines the profile-building anxiety of early Friendster with the group-messaging capabilities of texting, the manipulative potential of gossip, the secrecy of DMs, and the random diversions of parlor games. The contestants sweat over profile-picture selection—should they go with a smoking-hot bikini shot or a sweet close-up?—and their brief bios. They enact strategies both casual and more calculated: Some vow to just be themselves, while others formulate plans to dominate. And then there’s the kicker: Some of these contestants have a very particular strategy, which is to pretend to be someone they’re not, photos and all. (That’s the Catfish element.) Thanks to the many cameras in each contestant’s apartment, we get a front-row seat as each person sweats it out over the briefest message or their elaborate identity scam.

Knowing that some of the players are catfishes is the hook of this show—we can register the audacity of these people who are faking it and enjoy the dramatic irony of seeing how the lies land with other contestants. Take Seaburn, who is using photos of his gorgeous real-life girlfriend to persuade the others that he’s an attractive, shy lady called Rebecca. Seeing him pretend to be a woman—navigating flirtations with interested men, explaining that Rebecca’s whole “left side” hurts when she has her period—is slapstick at its modern best. Then there’s Alex, an ambitious opera nerd whose avatar, Adam, is a muscled-up bro who ventures sexually explicit comments, generally apropos of nothing. There’s a sense that for Alex the fitness-bro cosplay is more than a way to win big bucks; it’s also a way to see what it’s like to live in another person’s skin.

By Hayley Maitland

By Alex Kessler

As for the non-catfishes, The Circle ’s casting agents deserve an award because their selections are first-class. There’s Sammie, the seemingly brash and sexy party girl who simply melts when faced with another girl’s vulnerability. Then there’s audience favorite Shubham, a virtual-reality designer who has traditionally shunned social media and at one point dorkily refers to himself as an Indian James Bond. His personality is so unbuffed by the harsh, judgmental inputs of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter that watching him react to the show’s twists is like watching a baby seal being slapped in the face.

Most surprising and delightful is the Jersey Shore –adjacent Joey, whose fixation on blonde bombshells and affinity for dudes who are exactly like him might raise suspicions of douchiness. Yet as the show’s complications unfold, his anchors—loyalty, family, partying—stay put, leavened by unique bon mots (“You can tell that guy’s got a nice toothbrush”) and a soft heart that yields to any (hot) girl with a sad story.

But one of The Circle ’s most appealing qualities is more subtle than its dopamine-stimulating premise and the friendly characters you wouldn’t mind dallying with on the dance floor. Between chatting with their fellow contestants and participating in the occasional challenge, it seems like people who are actually on the show have very little to do at all. Host Michelle Buteau notes that each person is allowed to bring in one item from the outside—Shubham has his ping-pong table, for example—but for the most part they’re left to their own devices. It may seem like staking your chance at riches on your personality and looks would be a stressful task, but when you think about it, a free fixed-term residency (groceries provided) in a beautiful apartment where your only responsibilities are to chat with strangers and play games? Most reality shows seem like they’d be hell on earth, but this basically sounds like a vacation.

In fact, The Circle overall is surprisingly relaxing and life-affirming. Like in any other reality TV show designed to expose human foibles, it has its cringe moments and villains. But the gentler, more benevolent elements of human nature rise to the top like cream. The friendships and hijinks—no matter whether they’ll endure beyond the confines of the show—are so heartwarming that it’s surprising, and you feel like a scrooge not having expected better human nature to emerge. I don’t even care if I’ve been duped by conniving game players to believe that they’re good at heart and fun to hang out with. Today the finale will drop on Netflix, and we’ll see the contestants meet in person for the first time. It will feel like a party—probably an excellent one. I kind of wish I’d been invited.

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The Circle review – love, tears and tender truths when Jane Asher comes to call

Orange Tree, Richmond Strong emotions rule in a candid and well-judged Somerset Maugham comedy twisting romantic fates across generations of squabbling society

E lizabeth (Olivia Vinall), the dissatisfied young wife at the heart of Somerset Maugham’s 1921 drama, enters the drawing room holding a copy of Anna Karenina . It’s the kind of detail in Tom Littler’s deft production that speaks, well, volumes about romantic longings in a prosaic English country house.

Elizabeth is married to Arnold (Pete Ashmore), a stolid MP, and her imagination works overtime as she anticipates their weekend guests. In Arnold’s childhood, his mother, a famed society beauty, scandalously ran off with her lover, yet the ageing renegades disappoint: Jane Asher ’s Lady Kitty gaudily decorated in scarlet, all squawk and clatter, bickering with a querulous Nicholas Le Prevost. It wouldn’t be so dismaying if Elizabeth wasn’t herself contemplating doing a romantic runner.

Maugham – the missing link between Wilde and Coward – was gay, but unhappily married to Syrie, a celebrated interior designer. Does her passion inform Arnold, prone to lecture his neighbours on their decorative missteps? He shows more fondness for furniture than family: fair enough, perhaps, given the family, but discouraging to a young bride.

How do you design a satisfying private life? Arnold’s father (Clive Francis, wonderfully pitched), enjoys “the luxury of assisting financially a succession of dear little things, in a somewhat humble sphere, between the ages of 20 and 25”. When they hit 25 he packs them off with a diamond ring, like the Leonardo DiCaprio of the home counties.

Maugham’s play is consistently candid and surprising, and Littler’s production keeps us guessing about what Elizabeth will, or should, do. Vinall’s wide eyes fix on another breezy visitor: a hearty Englishman, here reimagined as a charming Indian businessman (Chirag Benedict Lobo, limber, flirty and in really good trousers).

Littler’s debut production as artistic director at the Orange Tree is strongly acted and nicely judged (jokes about dentures find a sympathetic audience), but also leans feelingly into the emotion. Asher and Le Prevost retain a seam of tenderness beneath their squabbling, while Ashmore suggests the unhappy toddler within the middle-aged man. Tears and tantrums are always close to the surface: following the heart’s demands is never easy.

• Somerset Maugham
• Orange Tree theatre

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L.A. Confidential: The Rollo Tomassi Twist Explained

Jurassic world 4’s “new era” can fix an original steven spielberg jurassic park mistake, alien: romulus' new franchise twist risks reviving prometheus' biggest criticism.

• Rotten Tomatoes employed a complex system to declare L.A. Confidential the #1 movie of all time.
• L.A. Confidential straddles old and new to achieve top ranking, balancing quality and surprise.
• Despite its critical acclaim, L.A. Confidential may not hold the cultural impact of other older classics.

Out of all the classic movies that might have been crowned champion, it's L.A. Confidential , an almost 30-year-old movie, that was recently surprisingly declared the best movie of all time by Rotten Tomatoes. L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson's 1997 neo-noir crime thriller , is based on the book of the same name by James Ellroy (who, ironically enough, hated the movie). The story is set in 1953 Los Angeles, capturing the City of Angels at the intersection of police corruption and Hollywood celebrity.

In early 1950s L.A., the LAPD is desperately trying to clean up its image and regain public trust after a series of corruption scandals. The cops rub up against gangsters and Hollywood starlets, prostitutes and millionaire businessmen as they navigate the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, the cops themselves often little better than the criminals they pursue . The movie oozes corruption and violence, sexuality and seduction. That balance landed L.A. Confidential high up on Rotten Tomatoes' list . Here's how.

A major plot thread of L.A. Confidential revolves around the name Rollo Tomassi. Here's the twist involving this "character" explained.

L.A. Confidential Is #1 On Rotten Tomatoes' Best Movies Of All Time List

Rotten tomatoes used a complicated system to assess.

Rotten Tomatoes recently released its 300 Best Movies of All Time list, ranking the top 300 movies. Of all the movies that might have won it, it's 1997's crime noir thriller L.A. Confidential that took the top spot . On the surface, this is an odd choice. There's no doubt that L.A. Confidential is an excellent movie, but best of all time seems like a stretch, especially when considering it beat out films like Casablanca (#3) and The Godfather (#2). It also beat other films that have a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critics score compared to L.A. Confidential 's 99%, such as Seven Samurai , Toy Story and Toy Story 2 , Singin' in the Rain , 12 Angry Men , and more.

Rotten Tomatoes employed a rigorous methodology to determine its ranking:

"How did we select and rank the movies? First, every movie here is Certified Fresh. Then we applied our recommendation formula, which considers a movie’s Tomatometer rating with assistance from its Audience Score, illuminating beloved sentiment from both sides. Critics-certified, audience-approved! Other factors weighing into the recommendation formula: a movie’s number of critics reviews, the number of Audience Score votes, and its year of release. An editorial pass is reserved to finesse the final list, which included minimum thresholds for each of these data points."

Rotten Tomatoes' methodology makes for a list that balances quality films with a few surprises, making sure that it's not merely a repeat of every other best movies of all time rankings . The entire list is well worth perusing simply to see where some land, and which ones were surprisingly left off, like Vertigo and 2001: A Space Odyssey . Some are unexpected, and some movies anyone might guess would be on a 10-spot list.

How L.A. Confidential Became Rotten Tomatoes' Best Movie Of All Time

L.a. confidential was in a sweet spot between old and new.

While it's impossible to know exactly how Rotten Tomatoes weighted their ranking, it appears movies from newer eras were weighted a little more heavily than movies from previous generations . That makes sense. Best movie of all time rankings tend to skew heavily in favor of classic movies, simply due to longevity, nostalgia, and historical impact. Though valid, those measurement criteria tend to lead to repetitive rankings that don't change much. In ranking the films like this, RT has allowed newer movies to break through the classic movie bias and mix things up.

On this list, movies released before the 1980s have fewer reviews to select from, and they came out at a time before the internet and verified Rotten Tomatoes ratings. They simply don't have as much to work with in terms of ratings and reviews. More recent movies on their list tend to be drawn from franchises, preexisting IP, and tentpole blockbusters. L.A. Confidential' s late 1990s release is in something of a sweet spot regarding timing: it has far more reviews than the other classic movies that rank in the top spots, but isn't so new that recency bias (or reverse bias, in this case) worked against it. It could be that L.A. Confidential ranks in the top spot because it perfectly straddles the line between old and new, mimicking an old noir style while reaping the benefits of both without the drawbacks .

Why L.A. Confidential Has 99% On Rotten Tomatoes

Curtis hanson's l.a. confidential is a truly great movie.

Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential would rightly be put on any great movie list, with it being one of the few neo-noir crime thrillers that doesn't start sliding into pulp territory . It's taut and gripping; author James Ellroy's 1990 novel made a perfect adaptive jump to the big screen, with the script by Hanson and Brian Helgeland being universally praised by critics. The cast is absolutely stacked with stars at the height of their fame in the 1990s, as well as new stars: L.A. Confidential , after all, was Russell Crowe's breakout American role . Other cast members include Kim Basinger, Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, Danny DeVito, and David Strathairn, a great balance of A-list stars and notable character actors.

The cast's acting and writing aren't the only highlights of the film, however. Critics also lauded Hanson's direction, Jerry Goldsmith's score, and Peter Honess' editing. Of the 165 critics' reviews currently on Rotten Tomatoes for L.A. Confidential , only one is rotten . Plenty of praise went to how Hanson captured the steamy noir feel of the seedy underbelly of midcentury Los Angeles while also fully realizing the characters: truly, it is one of the great movies about Los Angeles . The late, great Roger Ebert , for example, called L.A. Confidential " film noir, and so it is, but it is more: Unusually for a crime film, it deals with the psychology of the characters ... It contains all the elements of police action, but in a sharply clipped, more economical style; the action exists not for itself but to provide an arena for the personalities ."

Is L.A. Confidential Really The Best Movie Of All Time?

The best films inspire debate long after their release.

Some highly-regarded movies are only considered classics upon being reevaluated after decades, but L.A. Confidential doesn't suffer from being a movie that wasn't appreciated in its time. It was a critical and commercial success at the time of its release, making $126 million on a $35 million budget. It was nominated for a whopping nine Academy Awards, winning two, with Basinger's win for Best Supporting Actress being a special standout. Had it not gone up against the juggernaut that was James Cameron's Titanic that year, L.A. Confidential might have made off with at least half a dozen more Oscars by the end of the night.

For its craftsmanship and commercial impact, L.A. Confidential was selected in 2015 to be archived in the National Film Registry, an honor reserved for films that are deemed " culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant ." It's only one of three movies ever to sweep the "Big Four" critics' awards , being awarded the top prize that year by the National Society of Film Critics, National Board of Review, L.A. Film Critics Association, and New York Film Critics Circle. Considering the other two movies to achieve that impressive feat were Schindler's List and The Social Network , L.A. Confidential is in rare company.

Despite that, it's hard to agree with Rotten Tomatoes' assessment that L.A. Confidential is the best movie of all time. It's certainly one of the best, but it lacks the cultural staying power of some of the other older movies on the list that are still quoted and referenced today. It also wasn't the influential powerhouse on movies that came after in the way certain films have been , such as Citizen Kane or any of Hitchcock's classics. It could be said it doesn't even belong on a Top 10 list of all-time best movies, but, again, that's arguably only because humans tend to give too much weight to older classics. However, that's the fun of movies: the great ones continue to inspire debate and lively assessment decades after their release.

Source: Roger Ebert

• LA Confidential

Netflix just added a disturbing AI movie that feels exactly like ‘Black Mirror’ — and it's 88% on Rotten Tomatoes

‘Upgrade’ combines AI and body horror

Artificial intelligence is a particularly huge topic of conversation right now . The very notion of this simulation taking over the world one day is scary enough, but imagine if it could control your mind through a computer chip implant. Well, the movie “Upgrade” captures this type of body horror perfectly, and it’s just been added to Netflix . 

“Upgrade” is a cyberpunk action thriller movie that keeps your attention for one hour and forty minutes. I can guarantee the whole time you’ll be glued to the screen, shocked and slightly disturbed about how technology can dominate humans in such a frightening way. Logan Marshall-Green, known for other projects like “The Invitation” and “Prometheus”, plays a traumatized and paralyzed man who has no choice but to rely on AI.  

Curious to learn more about the sinister intentions behind AI? Let’s delve into some basic plot details and whether you should stream “Upgrade” on Netflix. 

What is ‘Upgrade about?

“Upgrade” follows a paralyzed man named Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green), who now uses a wheelchair after being brutally mugged after his self-driving car malfunctions. The muggers also killed his wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) after the accident, leaving him with immense trauma and depression. However, a billionaire inventor offers Grey a computer chip implant that will essentially “cure” him. 

“Upgrade” feels like an 80s movie with modern filmmaking methods.

Now, able to walk with superhuman strength, Grey has the chance to hunt down the attackers and destroy them by himself. “Upgrade” is a violent action-packed revenge movie that will have you sweating and wincing at times, but it also reveals how this near-future driven by technology is incredibly dangerous. 

This intense thriller was directed and written by Leigh Whannell, who also worked on some of James Wan’s movies like “Saw”, “Insidious”, and “The Invisible Man”. You can clearly see the horror elements weaved into the cinematography and setting throughout, which makes “Upgrade” feel like an 80s movie with modern filmmaking methods.

Critics and audiences enjoyed this futuristic thriller 

Critics and audiences have praised this movie for its dark action and believable performances. Right now, “Upgrade” has 88% on Rotten Tomatoes , proving that it's one to watch if you need something entertaining and thrilling at the same time. 

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In terms of reviews, many critics compared this movie to the science-fiction series “Black Mirror” . If you haven’t seen or heard of this show, each episode focuses on a different story about the unease of technology and how it can affect society in frightening ways. Matt Brunson from Film Frenzy said: “With its emphasis on technology, slightly futuristic setting, and fondness for disturbing developments, Upgrade feels like an episode of Black Mirror that somehow managed to break free from its Netflix surroundings and emerge unscathed on the big screen.”

Adam Graham from Detroit News also agreed with the “Black Mirror” vibes by saying: “Part Black Mirror, part Ex-Machina and part Hardcore Henry, Upgrade is a cuckoo science fiction horror pastiche that's smarter than it looks.” 

Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl believes Upgrade offers “memorable, legible fights, a compelling bombed-out retro-apocalyptic look and a mystery that seems obvious at the start but then keeps twisting.”

Not everyone is going to enjoy this AI body horror though. Nigel Andrews from Financial Times thought the movie was “fun for an hour, then a self-drive speed ride to nowhere very much.”

‘Upgrade’ is worth a watch on Netflix

You should absolutely stream “Upgrade” on Netflix if you enjoy futuristic movies with gory violence and fun action sequences. Marshall-Green does a great job playing a desperate man who will do anything to seek revenge. Plus, a good revenge movie is always satisfying to watch. 

Who knows, this movie could even encourage you to binge-watch “Black Mirror”. Netflix is bringing back “Black Mirror” in 2025 with six new episodes , so it’s definitely worth watching if you’re into creepy science-fiction thrillers. Just don’t let “Upgrade” give you nightmares about how intelligent AI might get in the future… 

Want more? Check out one of the best disturbing dramas on Netflix or watch the top psychological thrillers you probably haven’t seen before . 

Stream “Upgrade” on Netflix now.

More from Tom's Guide

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Alix is a Streaming Writer at Tom’s Guide, which basically means watching the best movies and TV shows and then writing about them. Previously, she worked as a freelance writer for Screen Rant and Bough Digital, both of which sparked her interest in the entertainment industry. When she’s not writing about the latest movies and TV shows, she’s either playing horror video games on her PC or working on her first novel.

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The Big Cigar: Limited Series Reviews

Enjoyably watchable if occasionally tonally uncertain.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 19, 2024

The Big Cigar strikes different thematic tones with superb lead performances. Newton running from abhorrent racism as America's most wanted is deadly serious, while Hollywood moguls and their actor acolytes have a degree of dark humor.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 18, 2024

And it’s a shame that the writing can’t manage to create a coherent and compelling story out of the source material, because the series has a hell of a leading performance from Holland that is utterly wasted within the confused storytelling.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.2/5 | May 18, 2024

While The Big Cigar pays lip service to the issues that dominated Newton’s life, they serve as a smokescreen for what it really wants to be most of the time… a Shaft-era Blaxploitation caper movie in six episodes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 17, 2024

What should be an enticing mashup of the civil-rights movement and Hollywood in the freewheeling ‘70s doesn’t entirely ignite, in a limited series whose underlying true story packs more of a wallop than the finished product.

Full Review | May 17, 2024

Despite our reservations about the storytelling in The Big Cigar, we were impressed by Holland’s turn as Huey P. Newton. That alone is enough to watch this fast-moving series.

There’s one impeccable element: André Holland. Perfectly cast and delivering a performance filled with equal parts fear, anger, and tenderness... [Holland] again commands each scene with a grounded, raw charisma.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | May 17, 2024

There are shootouts and shady characters and heartbreaking losses to round it all out, giving the story an underground feel with high production values. You know where the tale is going, but in true Hollywood style the journey is what matters.

The Big Cigar doesn’t deify its activist characters, but neither does it hide its sympathies.

Impeccably scripted, soulfully directed and filled with fine performances, 'The Big Cigar' is a riveting work.

André Holland does a brilliant job of capturing the complicated and charismatic Black Panthers co-founder.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 17, 2024

There are times when, over the course of its six episodes, The Big Cigar feels like it could’ve used a trim, a tighter container, and, perhaps, benefited from being a movie and not a limited series.

Having made a name for himself in supporting roles, Holland here rises to the dual challenge of both leading a series and convincing as a born, bold leader.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 17, 2024

'The Big Cigar' is layered and told with such clarity, humor, and care. Every department from the writers to the set designers are at the top of their game. Watching this limited series is like being transported back to the 1970s.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 17, 2024

The series lacks the craft and conviction of the shows and films it imitates.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 17, 2024

It's a fine series, but paired with a script that is all over the place, neither the story nor the performance hit their peaks.

It’s a quick, exciting injection of historical entertainment, grounded by terrific lead performances, but what seemed like a selling point turns out to be a slight red flag.

Full Review | Original Score: 7.2/10 | May 17, 2024

Despite the stellar acting, detailed set design and an electric musical score, The Big Cigar never finds solid ground because the center of Newton’s story isn’t placed in focus.

The Big Cigar ends up being two different unsatisfying shows squished together into six episodes of under 42 minutes apiece -- occasionally stylish and boasting a very good lead performance by André Holland, but frustratingly mediocre overall.

The Big Cigar has supplied a dispiriting answer to its own still pertinent question: no, Hollywood can’t be trusted to authentically tell the stories of Black radicals; the compulsion to centre whiteness is just too strong.

10 Nearly Perfect Movies With a 99% Score on Rotten Tomatoes

Stunningly great movies on the edge of perfection.

Some might say that there are no perfect movies, but there are some outstanding few that come exceptionally close. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, there are some movies that have been positively reviewed by nearly all approved critics, obtaining the rare yet coveted achievement of holding a 99% approval rating on the site.

Some of these are considered among the very best films of all time, like Casablanca , while others are modern classics loved by virtually anyone who sees them, like Paddington 2 . What they all have in common is that almost all critics thought they were worthy of the utmost praise . Few movies are able to confidently say that they're close to perfection, but these have earned that honor and then some.

10 'Finding Nemo' (2003)

Directed by andrew stanton.

The third-ever winner of the Best Animated Feature Academy Award, Finding Nemo is the charming story of a timid clownfish who embarks on a journey to rescue his son, who was taken by a diver. He'll get the help of Dory, a blue tang with a bad case of short-term memory loss. Their journey will prove to be full of dangers, laughs, and — of course — plenty of emotional payoffs.

A beloved Pixar classic, the movie tugs at the heartstrings as often as it thrills and gets laughs. Although it may seem like a rather simple film on the surface, its impressive animation, vivid cast of characters, and complex narrative about fatherhood and courage all make it an amazing experience. Critics on Rotten Tomatoes evidently agreed, calling the film touching , humorous, and surprisingly full of artistic merit.

Finding Nemo

*Availability in US

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9 'Lady Bird' (2017)

Directed by greta gerwig.

Lady Bird is Greta Gerwig 's outstanding sophomore directing effort and the highest-rated A24 comedy on Rotten Tomatoes. It's a tender and often hilarious coming-of-age comedy about a seventeen-year-old who calls herself Lady Bird. The story follows her as she grapples with the tribulations of her senior year in high school in Sacramento, California. Heavily inspired by Gerwig's own experiences coming of age in Sacramento, the film is one of the most intimate and profoundly affecting in the genre.

The movie gracefully maneuvers across themes like growing up and feminine adolescence. In the process, it delivers all kinds of emotions, from sincere laughs to bittersweet tears. It's one of the most enjoyable and relatable coming-of-age films of recent years , and more than worthy of the approval of 99% of Rotten Tomatoes critics.

8 'Goldfinger' (1964)

Directed by guy hamilton.

Even after a whopping sixty years since the beginning of the 007 franchise, Goldfinger (the third movie in the series), where Sean Connery 's James Bond uncovers a conspiracy to raid Fort Knox and obliterate the world economy, is still considered by many to be the best of the whole franchise. Thrilling, delightfully self-aware, and the origin of many of the series's most iconic trademarks, it's a spy classic for all those who love the genre.

The movie is fully conscious of what makes spy movies so fun and uses those elements to their fullest potential . It has one of the best Bond girls, one of the best Bond villains, one of the best Bond songs, and Connery at his best in the role. Critics very much appreciated the movie's perfect balance between seriousness and camp, which they thought resulted in an unforgettable evolution of the character.

Goldfinger (1964)

7 'how to train your dragon' (2010), directed by dean deblois and chris sanders.

The How to Train Your Dragon trilogy is one of the highest-rated movie franchises on Rotten Tomatoes, but the best entry is undoubtedly the first movie. Here, the teenage son of a Viking leader from the dragon-hunting village of Berk secretly befriends one of the beasts, discovering that there's a lot more to them than he used to think.

The world-building, characterization, and nuanced story are all top-notch, resulting in one of the most fun and acclaimed fantasy films of the 21st century so far , animated or otherwise. High fantasy at its very best , How to Train Your Dragon obtained the approval of critics who thought that the animation was impressive, the characters were really endearing, and the script had a surprising amount of depth and nuance.

How to Train Your Dragon

6 'the third man' (1949), directed by carol reed.

The classic film noir The Third Man is a thoroughly engrossing movie about a novelist traveling to post-war Vienna as a guest of his old friend Harry Lime, only to discover that his pal has mysteriously died. One of the best noirs of all time , The Third Man soars thanks to Carol Reed 's atmospheric direction, Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles 's intrepid performances, and the script's perfect understanding of noir elements and what makes them work.

With surprising twists and turns, a captivating story, compelling characters, and the inexplicably magical charm of Welles and Cotten, The Third Man is unsurprisingly considered one of the best movies not only of its genre, but of all time . Critics on Rotten Tomatoes loved the film's Viennese setting and the way Reed turns it into a whole other character, allowing it to function as the playground of these fascinating characters and their gripping story.

The Third Man

5 'all about eve' (1950), directed by joseph l. mankiewicz.

Though he's best known as one of the most prolific and outstanding screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age, Joseph L. Mankiewicz also directed quite a few incredible movies. His best is usually agreed to be All About Eve , the Best Picture Oscar-winning drama about a secretly ruthless ingénue who insinuates herself into the lives of an aging Broadway star and her circle of friends.

The critics' consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is that All About Eve is intelligent, elegant, and "devastatingly funny." Offering some outstanding writing and directing from Mankiewicz, as well as the legendary Bette Davis 's best work , the movie left an indelible mark on Classical Hollywood and film history at large . The tone is incessantly witty, the dialogue flows like honey, and the characters are nothing if not riveting.

All About Eve

Rent on Amazon

4 'On the Waterfront' (1954)

Directed by elia kazan.

Winner of 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, On the Waterfront is an Elia Kazan classic about a man who dreams of being a prizefighter while running errands at the New Jersey docks. Elvis Presley himself was obsessed with the film , and it isn't hard to see why. It's a brilliantly written and directed film, resulting in an electrifying study of the corruptive potential of power.

Unsparingly realistic with a fascinating narrative and really effective elements of character study, the movie makes itself entirely deserving of all the praise at every turn . It also features one of the most jaw-dropping acting performances ever put on screen, by the landmark in film history that was Marlon Brando . With this revolutionary performance, the thespian broke new ground in showing the things that film acting could do.

On The Waterfront (1954)

Watch on Amazon Prime

3 'Paddington 2' (2017)

Directed by paul king.

For those who have been having a tough day and need a hug, Paddington 2 is a movie that feels just like that much-needed warmth. In it, Paddington the bear picks up a series of odd jobs to get his aunt a present, but it gets stolen by a master of disguise named Phoenix Buchanan, played by an intoxicating Hugh Grant in what might be one of his best performances ever.

Simple in its scope and gentle in its approach, this is one of those movies that are practically impossible to hate (save for a couple of killjoy critics, that is) . It's funny, it's sweet, it's wonderfully paced, and it improves on everything that made the first film so adorable. Family comedies don't often join the ranks of the best movies ever made, but for Rotten Tomatoes critics, Paddington 2 earns the title magnificently.

Paddington 2

2 'casablanca' (1942), directed by michael curtiz.

In this beautiful romantic drama, a cynical American ex-patriate running a nightclub in Casablanca during early WWII faces unforeseen challenges when a former lover shows up at his doorstep. Casablanca is universally agreed to be one of the best Oscar-winning World War movies , thanks to magnetic performances by Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart and one of the best screenplays ever written.

Casablanca is by far one of the best movies of Hollywood's Golden Age, full of quotable dialogue, intriguing plot points, and richly layered characters. It's not only the writing that shines, though. It's masterfully crafted all around, a visually and aurally arresting experience bolstered by a wonderful narrative that's just the cherry on top.

1 'Citizen Kane' (1941)

Directed by orson welles.

It has been over 80 years, and yet this spellbinding mystery drama chronicling the rise and fall of a journalist magnate is still considered by many critics and audience members to be the absolute best movie ever made. Citizen Kane needs no introduction, since it's virtually always found in discussions of the most revolutionary and influential films of all time.

Packed with complex depth and a narrative style way ahead of its time, Citizen Kane grabs audiences' attention from the moment it starts and doesn't let go until the credits roll . It's intriguing, thematically rich, amazingly directed, and it has stunning visuals and a talented cast. If there's any film deserving of being considered nearly perfect , critics think that it's this one.

Citizen Kane

NEXT: The Best Movies With a Perfect 100% Score on Rotten Tomatoes

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Netflix's new rom-com debuts with 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating

"There's not a single original idea in Mother of the Bride ."

The movie, which was released on May 9, stars iCarly 's Miranda Cosgrove as Emma, who shocks her mother Lana ( Law & Order 's Brooke Shields) when she announces that she will be getting married in Thailand in a month's time.

Lana's life is further turned upside down when she learns that the father of Emma's fiancé is her own ex-boyfriend ( Coco 's Benjamin Bratt).

Related: Netflix's Unfrosted lands low Rotten Tomatoes rating after first reviews

Mother of the Bride did not impress critics, however, as it debuted with a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from nine reviews. It has rallied slightly to 21% from 24 reviews after some more flattering reviews.

Among the issues raised, some suggested that it is "predictable" and "more like a hotel advertisement" than a movie.

Here's what reviewers have been saying:

The Guardian

"It’s a slight cut above just how very bad these things can get, but not enough to edge it toward something that would deserve your full attention. So errand away, Mother of the Bride will be just fine playing in the background."

"You know when you check into a hotel and the default TV channel is the hotel promotion channel? Serene music plays as people eat delicious hotel food, workout without sweating in the glam hotel gym and get the best sleep of their lives in a luxurious hotel bed? The new Netflix movie Mother of the Bride is kind of like that, except with Brooke Shields, Benjamin Bratt, iCarly and the guy from One Tree Hill ."

Movie Nation

"'Innocuous, predictable and well-cast' is about all the praise Mother of the Bride warrants, unless you consider another movie featuring the lovely scenery of Phuket, Thailand, a deal-maker."

Mark Reviews Movies

"There's not a single original idea in Mother of the Bride , which starts to look more like a hotel advertisement than an actual movie."

The Weekend Warrior

"This is absolute garbage, to the point where I really can’t find anything good to say about it, other than it’s a movie… that somehow got greenlit and released… by Netflix, no less."

Mother of the Bride is streaming now on Netflix.

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Sam is a freelance reporter and sub-editor who has a particular interest in movies , TV and music. After completing a journalism Masters at City University, London, Sam joined Digital Spy as a reporter, and has also freelanced for publications such as NME and Screen International .  Sam, who also has a degree in Film, can wax lyrical about everything from Lord of the Rings to Love Is Blind , and is equally in his element crossing every 't' and dotting every 'i' as a sub-editor.

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