Rating: 
Summary: Pretty Vacant
Review: Having seen some beautiful stills from the film, heard the soundbites I was expecting something pretty damn good.Be scared, be very scared. Of this film. Avoid at all costs. I repeat, all costs. It's a shimmery, pretty, fluffy ball of nonsense. The only real highlight is the end. When you can leave the cinema or turn off the DVD/Video. Phew, what a relief. The dialogue is agony, the acting is abysmal, the story....er, what story? And, oh dear, the lead actress. How does she get away with it? Somewhere a little old lady is smiling away to herself, thinking that she was the Drama teacher that told the little Jennifer that one day she would be a great actress. Big mistake. Huge mistake. Maybe she was good at playing a tree, she's certainly wooden! PS The 1 star rating is because I couldn't complete this form with it! Consider the rating to be less than 0.
Rating: 
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: From the previews I expected this movie to be much more of a science fiction rendition of a Salvador Daliesque fantasy world than another Silence of the Lambs with fantasy overtones. I did enjoy it somewhat, and the fantasy scenes were colorful and well-executed, but at the heart of this movie is a schizophrenic detective movie and I found it to be a let-down; not what I was expecting.
Rating:
Summary: Digusting, sick and twisted
Review: Starring Jennifer Lopez as a psychotherapist who journeys inside the mind of a comatose serial killer in hopes of saving his latest victim, the movie plays like one long bizarre music video without the music, employing mind blowing technical effects that keep getting more gruesome and sick. The movie did grab my attention and hold it throughout. It moved fast and fans of Ms. Lopez will enjoy the display of her body and many changes of costumes and moods. But the total feeling is that of a surreal computer game focusing on torture. It's supposedly inside of a twisted mind. And it obviously takes a twisted mind to produce it too. The plot line might be clear but this movie is not about the plot. And forget about the acting. Nobody notices it anyway. All that is remembered is one long nightmarish trip ripe with violence, murder and horror. The sickening images linger long after the movie is over and are difficult to erase. I can't understand all the rave reviews for this disgusting sick movie. Take my advice and stay away from it!
Rating: 
Summary: A visually spectacular, but not quite fully fulfiling film
Review: The film begins with a visually impressive scene, with Jennifer Lopez in a white dress walking at the top of a large sand dune, then arriving beside a boy, and showing a huge ship buried in the sand. The beginning has a surreal feel to it. Miss Lopez has a gift of being able to go inside the mind of traumatised kids to help them.Meanwhile, there is a deranged killer at large named Carl Stargher. This guy is really disturbed. He puts women in a glass cell, and fills it up with water, slowly (it takes forty hours to fill). Then when they are dead, he covers them in bleach and places them on a table. Then he suspends himself above the body via hooks embedded in his skin, and masturbates. When Stargher falls into a coma, Miss Lopez is asked to go inside his mind to discover the location of a victim. The following scenes are where the film excels. Inside Stargher's mind are a collection of spectacular surreal images; and also a psychedelic trip, when a FBI agent enters the killer's mind. Some of the scenes are gory too; including one where the FBI agent's entrails are pulled out by Stargher and wrapped around a spiked skewer. These scenes make the film worthwhile, and another positive is ultra sexy Jennifer Lopez; but somehow the film doesn't quite fulfil. Like Greenaway's Prospero's Books, this one is worth watching just to look at it. A visually spectacular, but not quite fully fulfiling film. The DVD is superb. The picture is an excellent transfer in widescreen, which is hard to fault at all. The sound is in Dolby 5.1 and 2.0 and is very good, especially effective during the trip scenes. The extras are quite extensive. There's two commentaries; one by the director, and one by the production team. Both are informative about the effects of the film. There's a documentary on the making the film, plus some vignettes about the special effects, which uses the multi-angle feature in the same way as the Fight Club DVD. There's some deleted scenes, each with the director's commentary. There are two trailers, the theatrical and international. There is also an interesting empathy test, which asks you ten questions about your personality and gives you a score; plus there's a map of the brain, and all the parts explained. This is a DVD that you must own if you want a nice clear picture and some spectacularly surreal imagery, plus the voluptuous Jennifer Lopez in a skin-tight suit. That can't be bad can it?
Rating:
Summary: Empathetic and Technically Accomplished
Review: Borrowing freely from Altered States and myriad serial-killer films, The Cell surpasses all of them in technical virtuosity, with stunning visual and sound effects. For this it should garner an Academy Award or two. The plot, however, is highly derivative and unworthy of note except that the film is rather more empathetic toward the characters, including the killer himself who, although a demon, is a very human demon. Well worth renting if you are in the mood for a familiar fright, well worth owning only if you are enamoured with technical accomplishment.
Rating:
Summary: Shocking
Review: I saw this movie for the first time on DVD. I didn't go see it because of what I had heard about it. This is a really good movie. It is very graphic and there are some very disturbing sences but it keeps you interested throughout the movie. I especially like it because I studied Pycology and I understand exactly whats happening. It's an interesting view on a graphic representation of the mind. If you like supense and even a little drama you'll like this.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful Filmaking.
Review: The Cell...Involves an open mind, a willing concience, and a deeper appreciation for innovation and style. Director Tarsem Singh takes his audience captive, (no pun intended) with beautiful, spacious, ellegant set designs, asking us to look past pre-conceptions, (for those of you who think you know hollywood up one side and down another.) As an artist/design student, I have been able to see techniques pulling from a design standpoint. Anyway, As far as THE CELL being a jolly frollick through the poppy's, it isn't. But you have to give credit to the director of such a daring piece... Note: To person who said the CELL had better special effects than hollow man, Please..Hollow Man WAS special effects...The cell really had very little CGI involved.. Your mistaking beauty for "special effects"
Rating: 
Summary: Good Visuals, same old movie
Review: The overall plot to the movie has been used at least a thousand times, FBI on a huge hunt to find a serial killer and his latest victim(who they beleive is hidden somewhere and still alive). But this movie has a twist in that the killer has just been found but is in a comatose state. They bring in the help of a specialist(Lopez) and the use of a machine that will allow them to enter the killers mind and try and find where the latest victim is. The plot has two different themes, The FBI agent is going into the mind of the killer just to find the girl who is missing. The Doctor goes into the mind of the killer to save the killer from his horrible childhood, and save him from the pain he is living with. Now the plot seems were interesting and with the incredible visuals it seems as if this movie would be 5 stars, but the director decided to make the movie short and to the point and not stimulate our minds at all. If the director had gone into more detail, when you were brought into the killers mind, such as more background information so the audience could feel how the killer felt growing up, then this movie would have been really good. We got just a brief view of what made the killer who he was, but never got a good understanding of him and was not able to feel and sympathy for the little boy that was hidden in the horrible mind of a mad man. To sum this movie up, I say rent it and have low expectations. Some may like it, but it is more of a movie you could wait for until it is on HBO/Showtime.
Rating:
Summary: The Cell, A exploration of a film
Review: The cell is unfortunatly a film that most ppl think is crap.. this is simply not true. If you are expecting a horror film then don't watch this (the t.v spots did a wonderful job of misleading the true element of the film). Jennifer lopez is wonderful and the other characters are terrific in thier roles as well, this film is simply put a drama with suspense thrown in for good measure. The special f/x were considered highly over plot and story but that doesn't mean the film didn't work, in fact it worked wonderfully and if your reading this you should think about seeing The Cell purely for the satisfaction of experiencing Ms. Lopez's acting and great range of emotion.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning and moving.
Review: Enter into the mind of a serial killer, and you'll find that you have stepped into another world, one beyond that of any sane imagination. This is exactly the treatment you will receive with "The Cell," New Line Cinema's best release since the thriller "Seven." There have been so many movies I've seen that indulge in special effects to tell their stories, but never has there been one that is more surreal and phantasmagoric than this one, which will certainly give audiences their share of scares, thrills, and mind-playing tricks that make this movie one of the most intelligent and intense cinematic experiences ever put to film. The movie opens with a woman in a white flowing gown walking through a somewhat sinister desert until she reaches a small boy in a clearing of dead trees. After a small talk with the boy, Catherine soon transports herself back into her own mind, and back into reality, where she is a child therapist who uses an experimental process to pry into the psyche of children in order to free them of their inner torments. "Do you believe there's a part of yourself that you don't show anybody?" she asks someone during the course of the movie. "When I'm inside, I get to see those things." The process is only under experiment, invented by the parents of the boy whose mind Catherine enters into. Meanwhile, detectives stumble upon the recent victim of serial killer Carl Stargher, who keeps his victims inside a small cell which begins to fill up with water after forty hours, drowning the woman inside. He then bleaches the body and makes it up to look like a porcelain doll, all the while suspending himself in the air from steel rings in the skin of his back. The police soon find enough evidence to locate him, though only after he claims another woman and locks her away, starting the inevitable countdown to her final doom. When the police arrest Stargher, they find him in a comatose state due to a severe case of schizophrenia, and when they realize that they have no other choice, they transport him to the facility and ask Catherine to enter into his mind in order to discover the whereabouts of the latest victim before time runs out. With a slight hesitation, Catherine agrees, and soon the process begins with heightened intensity. This is the point at which the film begins to accelerate into an intense charybdis of the surreal, the supernatural, and the totally insane. With Catherine, we are transported into an extraordinarily frightening world that is full of macabre images, mysterious and inexplicable occurences, sudden changes in scenery and atmosphere, and an overall sense of darkness, dampness and filth. As we are taken into Stargher's mind, we are allowed to see what permeates through his subconscious, as well as the events that lead up to his crimes. All of this is nothing short of astounding and totally involving filmmaking that will wrap you up in a gossamer blanket of decay and the unknown. While most critics uphold the notion that there is no emotion or feeling within the story, I feel that there is a balance between the visual imagery and the plot. The suspense for this thriller is, for the most part, very original in the way the killer's victims are treated, and while most movies would not do this, "The Cell" chooses to create an immense amount of sympathy for the killer as Catherine meets him in his own mind. Her view of his life as a child allows for the audience to feel sorrow for his character, and to understand, to a small degree, the reasons for his murderous actions. I applaud the filmmakers for taking such a risky approach and being able to make it work. The film also hosts some of the finest acting I've seen in years in a film like this. Jennifer Lopez does a fantastic job as Catherine Deane, proving that her acting is stable and quite enjoyable. The intensity and depth of her performance are ranked with such actresses as Annette Bening's work on "In Dreams," and Ashley Judd's performance in "Kiss The Girls." Vince Vaughn plays Peter Novak, the detective who discovers Stargher, and later enters into his mind as well in order to rescue Catherine from her prison. His character is pretty much mid-caliber, but even at that level, he stills delivers a stellar performance that keeps the movie moving in key scenes. And then comes the ever-creepy Vincent D'Onofrio, who never fails to dazzle the camera with ultra-freaky glances, actions and moments of total insanity. After watching this movie, try imagining someone else in his place with the role of Carl Stargher; you won't be able to do it. For all of its creative genius, "The Cell" receives two and a half stars from me. For the emotion that it is able to evoke through the characters it portrays, it receives the final one and a half stars needed to make it perfect. There really has never been a better film that combines the supernatural and surreal with a believable story and likeable acting. I think that it would be a shame to pass up this delightful yet very haunting movie experience; maybe Oscar will get it right this time and at least nominate this one for something.
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