5/5 Utterly engrossing and wonderfully made
  by One-Line Film Reviews (Easton, MD)
The Bottom Line:

A great film that introduces and develops a half-dozen connected storylines in a thoroughly unique manner before introducing a plot element that has polarized viewers but completely fits in the context of the film, Magnolia is a modern masterpiece by PT Anderson which will stay with you long after much tamer and shorter (it is long, though very fast-moving) films are gone; don't be put off by the nay-sayers--see this stunning film.

4/4

1/5 Hard to follow and boring
  by Night
The plot (if you call it that) was dull and hard to follow. The characters weren't believable and the constant playing of music throughout the movie gave me a headache.

Would have given it a 2 star if they removed all the crappy music.

5/5 So moving & powerful it brought me to tears, but it's not for everyone.
  by James Uva (Syracuse, NY United States)
First off, the myriad positive and well-thought out reviews for this film are dead on. However, so are the negative reviews, in their own way.

It's simple, really. There are a few different catagories of film. For example, a film such as, say, 'STAR WARS', or 'E.T.', maybe, is almost universally lauded as an enjoyable, if somewhat unchallenging, film to watch. Then, you have films like 'MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO' or 'MEMENTO', films that march to a beat all their own and demand that the audience pay close attention. This is the category that 'MAGNOLIA' falls under. This is not a fun romp to injest on a random Tuesday evening. This film demands your attention from the first moment, and doesn't let go until after the end of the haunting closing title song by the amazing Aimee Mann. The flow and ebb of this film is akin to a heartbeat, with natural pauses, natural progressions, natural rhythms. The story and plot have been regurgitated ad nauseum, so no need to do a book report on it here. However, the plot is so interwoven into the actions and choices of the characters in this film that it's almost secondary. As you go through this day-in-the-life of all characters involved, and start to see how they are all connected, each revelation heart-breakingly and expertly built upon the next, untill, by the end of the film, we're left with the 2 new lovers, closing on the hope that they will not only overcome the heartache and betrayal of their earlier lives, but maybe avoid those self-same mistakes in their future.

There's one other factor that goes into watching this film that, while not taking away from it, is absolutely essential in understanding and appreciating it, and that's a certain level of experience and understanding with the lonliness that the film exudes like sweat. Let's face it, and not to be too rude or cliche, but if a person to young to have experienced loss and betrayal, or a twenty or thirty-something person who married the first person they ever met and wrangles 3 or 4 kids while trying to keep a family together and listening to the local easy listening radio station in the mini-van with the soccer sticker on the side watches this film, there will be an immediate and visceral reaction of disdain for the film. The issues in this film hit home the most with people who've lived a life a little outside the norm. The issues in this film are not swept under the rug, they are right there in your face, laid bare and ugly, and for some people that's just too much for them to face if they've never taken the time to face those issues in their own lives.

I'm not saying the film can't be appreciated by people I've described above; I'm merely offering my input on why some people have such a strange hatred of the film. All in all, I find this film beautiful, heartbreakingly real, and true.

3/5 Yep, a Hard Secular Rain is Going to Fall
  by Gregory Child (Salt Lake City)
Okay, I give the technical aspects of this film 5 stars. But 1 star for content. I like look-at-me camera work to an extent. The acting is all the way from pretty good to extraordinary. I can feel the actor's excitement at getting such actorly things to act upon (but, still, maybe a little too James Lipton "Actor's Studio"? Just maybe?). The energy to keep all the balls in the air on this film is very high. But I agree with the criticisms desiring substance over style. This is a perfect academic case of a director going straight up his anus all the way up the alimentary canal and out his mouth again and then proceeding to take another roundtripper through the digestive system. I get the redemptive elements, I get the human elements. I get the secular quasi-eschatological elements. I get it. I just don't think the substance is that good.

I think the director DOES prepare us for the frogs from the very beginning of the film. Yeah, it's a hard biblical rain that's 'a fallin' and it portends something apocalyptic. And, lo, here comes the angel of the lord in the raps of that little ghetto boy and the psalms/jeremiads being pronounced by the little boy genius on the quiz show with the angel/caduceus symbol in the background making him look so cherubic and so forth. I get that. But, from what I can understand from reading commentary from the director and others, is that he was bolting all this stuff on as he went along in the filmmaking process. Okay, that's fine. A lot of films are made in an ad hoc, improvisatory style. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Here Mr. Anderson has made a huge stew of a movie that's never uninteresting to look at it's just. . .look, if he's making a humanistic sermon about whatever he's thinking about in life I would prefer an actual religious sermon from a preacher who is trained at that kind of rhetoric.

Three more things: (1) the profanity. I know it's moralistic and nancy to say so, but using it so much just IS lazy writing. If I want to hear somebody spouting the "F" word in anger I can do that anytime in my own room for free. I'm good at writing that kind of dialogue on my own. What I want in a movie is some semblance of eloquence. It's hard to really understand Julianne Moore's (or some other's) anger because it's all F___ this and F___ that. In the pharmacy she went all ape caca over those poor pharmacists when she could have just demurred by saying to them "it's for someone i know" and then quietly leaving. I understand her going off on the lawyer she's known for years and leaving a whole mess. For me, if I'm the actor I would want more than that. I just can't dig this Big Lebowski dialogue and come up with a real deep characterization.

(2) The self-help guru's seminars. Tom Cruise's acting is great but if you've ever had real exposure to self help seminars and the actual content of those seminars it's some of the most brilliant balloon juice you've ever heard: Wayne Dyer's Power of Intention, Susie Orman or Dave Ramsey's financial shows, etc., etc. The material that Tom Cruise is working with is so turgid and painfully unaware of what really motivates a crowd. It's like listening to those old "Married With Children" episodes where Al Bundy is having a meeting with the No Ma'am group of guys, only without the truly raucous humor Al and the rest displayed.

(3) That game show has been on for 30 years? Not on any major television network I would know of. It's way too nerdy and wonky. Alex Trebek and "Jeopardy" never gets THAT rarefied. Some variant of "Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader" might last 30 years but not this. Only some rare opera buffs on the Metropolitan Opera are going to give you a riff from Carmen in the original French along with the melody. Only an eminent historian like Shelby Foote or David McCullough is going to be able to figure out who those quotes from coming from. But Luis Guzman? Are you kidding. Whatever Luis Guzman is like in real life, he mostly plays hoods and lowlifes and all of a sudden he's playing some genius polymath to go up against the young geniuses. Who's going to believe his posse. And why do the young geniuses only have the one kid to carry them? They've got two spoiled brats and this genius doormat. Come on! This resembles, maybe, an old college bowl quiz show that would show up local public television stations or public access. Maybe it is a quiz show from the magical realist land of Mr. Anderson but it sure ain't never been seen on NBC, ABC or CBS for no three decades.

I could go on. Summing it up. Exasperatingly watchable.

And keep saying to yourselves, people, "it's just a movie." It ain't kids starving in Africa.

5/5 A Great Film About Faith
  by CJA (Minneapolis, MN)
This is a story of faith, and of the the value of empathy and good works. The divine intervention and "deus ex machina" at the end of the film may be controversial, but it makes the point brilliantly. It's no more bizarre than anything recounted in the Bible and is meant to remind one of the various extraordinary plagues visited upon Egypt.

But the faith that matters -- the faith that stories of divine miracles are meant to inspire in us all -- is that of the nurse and cop who have the gift of empathy and the ability to see and to bring out the best in people.

The seemingly disconnected stories come together in a brilliant and compelling way. They are connected, after all, by the traumas visited upon us in our youth and about how those traumas continue to play out for the rest of our lives. We all share in this experience to some extent, and it's what unites us all.

Tom Cruise is surprisingly good in his role as the huckster son. Julianne Moore proves why she is one of our finest actresses. And then you have wonderful actors like Jason Robards and William Macy in supporting roles.

A couple of things don't work. The title makes no sense to me -- how does "Magnolia" capture the film's message of faith and hope? And the opening sequence of bizarre coincidences does not work for me. It misses the point that there are strange coincidences. What -- does the Supreme Being have some macabre sense of humor? The ultimate mystery is whether there is some force higher than us and the meaning of life appears to be having faith in something greater than us. The sketches at the beginning of the film don't capture this. Finally, the infamous sing-a-long scene by leading characters near the end of the film has been deservedly lampooned by critics -- though it is silly to suggest, as did the contemporaneous review in the New York Times, that one bad scene ruins the whole movie.

An absolutely wonderful film. Like "The Shawshank Redemption" it was a bomb in the theaters but will be seen in future years as one of the great films of the decade.