Rating: 
Summary: It actually does have a plot
Review: besides being visually stunning this movie has a very "good" plot. It is a thriller. It is a race against the clock. It is test to see if Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn can find out how they can find out where the victem is hidden. It truly is great. Now look at it this way. You actually have good acting except from a few of the minor characters, it gets your blood pumping, and it pulls you in. Now if you don't like a good plot, so be it. If you don't like a beautiful film, so be it. This is art at its fullest. This is a movie at its fullest. 4 stars for plot, 5 stars for visual, 5 stars for sound and 4 stars for acting. 4.5 is what it gets.
Rating: 
Summary: Ridiculous, Inane Drivel
Review: If you are in the mood for an MTV-style overblown production about absolutely nothing, riddled with disgusting imagery and saddled with pathetically amateurish writing, acting and directing, then get ahold of this DVD and get ready to spend a few hours rolling your eyes and smacking your head, wishing you had read this review first. Or had a V-8. OR ANYTHING.I could NOT BELIEVE THIS MOVIE COULD BE SO BAD. In fact, this may end up on somebody's "top ten worst" list at the end of the next millenium. You just want to scream--and not with fright. You just want to scream because Jennifer Lopez, as a child psychologist with a knack for empathizing with schizophenics, reveals that under her beauty lies a complete lack of acting ability after all( SELENA must have been a fluke), Vince Vaughn mails his performance in as a flaccid FBI agent (Note to Vince: get an AB-trainer), with one intriguing line in the whole movie, where he implies he may have been abused as a child...a line that goes nowhere...and D'Onofrio is so BORING as the serial murderer, he might as well have been bumped off halfway through the movie for all I cared.
The only amusing thing was watching the water in the murderer's automatic drowning tank fill up, "Perils of Pauline style", with the woman-to-be murdered screeching in terror off and on. Why was this amusing? Not because I am a sadist--no. it was amusing because it was SO IDIOTIC. As for sadism-- Get this if you want to torture yourself.
best,
Jean
Rating: 
Summary: A feast for the eyes to devour.
Review: Forget the plot! If you watch in the right frame of mind, your eyes will supply your brain with more than enough information to stop it from getting bored. I don't understand why a strong narrative is the only way to judge a film's worth? Fine, the story isn't that original, or especially complex. But the visuals are what this film is about. For christ's sake, film is a visual medium. What is wrong with creating a totally visual experience. The fact that its housed in a routine serial killer thriller is just incidental. 'The Cell' offers a whole new kind of cerebral stimulation. Its certainly a love it or hate it film. Its like staring at a beautiful painting for 2 hours. To develop the characters and the story further, would have been to compromise the visual depth. Dont get me wrong, its not one of the best films ever made. David Fincher made a serial killer film that was both incredibly visual, and intelligently written with 'Se7en'. But 'The Cell' is totally different, and in its own way, equally surprising. If you have an open mind, then let yourself be immersed in the visual beauty and creativity of this film. Well done Tarsem.
Rating:
Summary: Boring flick with no plot and wooden acting
Review: Someone compared this mess to "Se7en"??? What? An MTV videoclip is more like it. Boring, boring, BORING movie with "plot" consisting mainly of a few ripoffs and a lot of painfully MTV-ish special effects. It could have been better if it weren't for Lopez and her "acting". I'd rather watch a marble statue: both its acting skills and appealing are much, much better than those of Lopez. This is the worst movie I've seen this year.
Rating: 
Summary: One Of The Year's Best Films!
Review: One of the year's most dazzling and startling films. The films creates imagines that are so bizarre with it's effects that you can't help but get completely involved. This story is far from Shakespear, but, it's intense enough to keep you from checking your watch every 5 minutes to check when the movie ends. In a year that many have agreed is a disappointing year, I'm very pleased to have seen this film. I know many have heard both good and bad things about this movie. But, whatever you heard that was good about this movie is true. Director Tarsem Singh and screenwriter Mark Protosevich really had something here. The movie is about a doctor played by Jennifer Lopez, who has been involved with the program that can get you into someone else's mind. There is also a serial killer; Carl Stsrgher (Vincent D' Onofrio) who is on the loose. He kidnaps young women and takes them to a deserted place where police haven't found yet. When one women is kidnap and Carl where told is "like in a dream, where he'll never awake." The Police must now act fast. Within 40 hours the same woman will be murdered. The only problem is, since they can't get a confession, they have to find out where he keeps the women he kidnaps. This is where Catherine Deane (Lopez) and Officer Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) must come together and transport her into the mind of a serial killer. Once this happens we're let into a world we shall never forget. This is a intriguing movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat and will leave your mouth hanging open. I truly enjoyed this film and hope many others rent this film and share the same experience I did. I can see some Oscars coming this films way, "Best Special Effects", and also "Best Screenplay". Definitely stands as one of the year's best!
Rating:
Summary: Forget the movie, just look at the few pretty pictures.
Review: This film has only one thing going for it: lavish Peter Greeneway style visuals (I'm it seems one of the very few people who REALLY LIKE "Prospero's books"!). This movie has everything else against it. Boring story, boring uninteresting actors, a SciFi value lower than a "bad" episode of Transformers and a lot of sickening shots which are a rip-off of that other bad shock movie "Silence of the lambs". These shots are intended only to shock, they represent nothing of any storyvalue. This movie is like a bad conceived X-files episode. However "X-files" is just cheap television and to be enjoyed on that level. A theatermovie should be far more sophisticated since what else do you have that bigger budget for? All in all this movie is 90% waste of perfectly good celluloid. When this movie hits the rentalstore I'll do a montage of the visuals for my own enjoyment and forget that there ever was such a person as Jennifer "I can't act" Lopez.
Rating: 
Summary: Two for the price of one
Review: There were once two scripts. One really wonderful script that examined how we become who we are and what it would be like to share our very essence with another person. And, oh yeah, there was this other script that called "Seven Shining Silences as the Clock Ticks". The second script was approved for production, but in a valiant but failed effort to avoid making a complete formulaic abomination, the producers did the following:
1. Took key concepts from the great script and included them as one-line sound-bytes buried in the produced script.
2. They hired Tarsem to direct.
3. They hired Jennifer Lopez to star.
Unfortunately, their hamburger surgery did nothing at all to save this formulaic loser.
It is a beautiful loser, though. Tarsem rips off Stanley Kubrick decently, and the production design is interesting and colorful. Much of the imagerey in the "internal" sequences is really neat.
Actingwise, Lopez can actually act well enough to make me look forward to seeing her in a really substatial film.
Vince Vaughn fans - he's in straight "character actor" mode (no fault of his own - except for one minor conversation with Lopez, he's got zippo decent dialog) so don't get your hopes up. His character is part of the formula-thriller script, and so has a hard time functioning as a supporting character, especially since his story arc is MUCH less interesting than Lopez' (and hers isn't that great either). Vincent D'Onofrio is, unfortunately, not really given a whole lot to work with. His character is so over-the-top that he never becomes really menacing. The script relies on the "weird" production design way too much to tell the audience we should be scared. Hollywood needs to relearn what "atmosphere" is all about.
I really wanted to like this flick, but alas - it was not to be. Definitely worth a rental on a slow night, though.
Rating:
Summary: No, not even going to add the second star for the visuals
Review: People may ooh and ah over the visuals and they certainly can be pretty at times, but they would have more impact if they weren't stolen from music video cliches. When David Fincher got the Alien3 job, everyone was snide over his music video past, but he did a great movie and the genius of Alien3 wasn't appreciated until his original work - Seven, Fight Club - was embraced. All of the attitude that Fincher got that was undeserved should now be channeled and thrown at this director for his dull lifeless painting on film. Warhol would be proud of the protege and the rest of should be spiteful.
However there are some good lessons to be gleamed from this movie:
-- dating a music producer makes you stupid (or how else can you explani the pre-Puffy Lopez from Out of Sight vs. this dopy creature that she plays in this movie) -- Serial killers have interior worlds that look like Nine Inch Nails videos -- Nine Inch Nails videos that once looked cool now look stupid -- someone raised in a Baptist cult is going to be able to relate to Catholic iconagraphy no problem -- No matter how cool the Hispanic-Catholic visuals may look to some, Jennifer Lopez as the virgin Mary is merely silly -- Vincent D'Onofrio has one of the worst agents in Hollywood -- serial killers need to build elaborate water tanks and buy expensive video equipment in order to properly kill their victims -- serial killers have kitschy habits such as making dolls out of their victims -- raising a child in the Baptist faith and beating him will make him really obsessed with the color white for some mysterious reason -- Jennifer Lopez is a lousy actress -- Stephen Soderbergh (sic) is a genius for convincing us that she was a great actress -- Serial killers watch a lot of music videos and picture themselves either as pathetic little boys or Alice In Wonder characters
There are a few nice visuals that seem a little original, but most of these visuals are old hat. Besides that, all the visuals in the world cannot save this movie from the weight of its own pretension. Even Deliberate Stranger (that awful Mark Harmon as Ted Bundy tv movie) is better than this as far as serial killer movies go.
