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Alphabet Killer, The
20
American Carol, An
64
Appaloosa
26
Babylon A.D.
24
Bangkok Dangerous
60
Blind Mountain
57
Body of Lies
64
Brideshead Revisited
63
Burn After Reading
61
Bustin' Down the Door
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Changeling
49
Children of Huang Shi, The
58
City of Ember
15
College
43
Death Race
15
Disaster Movie
62
Duchess, The
43
Eagle Eye
xx
Eden Lake
58
Express, The
49
Family That Preys, The
28
Fireproof
57
Flash of Genius
72
Ghost Town
54
Hamlet 2
57
High School Musical 3: Senior Year
51
Holly
55
House Bunny, The
40
Igor
47
Lakeview Terrace
53
Lucky Ones, The
51
Mamma Mia!
31
Max Payne
58
Midnight Meat Train, The
35
Mirrors
31
Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, The
34
My Best Friend's Girl
66
Patti Smith: Dream of Life
64
Pineapple Express
55
Ping Pong Playa
45
Pride and Glory
53
Quarantine
56
Religulous
32
Repo! The Genetic Opera
36
Righteous Kill
53
Rocker, The
53
RocknRolla
78
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
51
Savage Grace
56
Save Me
19
Saw V
16
Surfer, Dude
47
Swing Vote
57
Towelhead
60
Traitor
70
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
61
Wackness, The
72
Woman on the Beach
27
Women, The
78
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
72
Woman on the Beach
72
Ghost Town
70
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
66
Patti Smith: Dream of Life
64
Brideshead Revisited
64
Pineapple Express
64
Appaloosa
63
Changeling
63
Burn After Reading
62
Duchess, The
61
Bustin' Down the Door
61
Wackness, The
60
Traitor
60
Blind Mountain
58
Midnight Meat Train, The
58
Express, The
58
City of Ember
57
Towelhead
57
Body of Lies
57
High School Musical 3: Senior Year
57
Flash of Genius
56
Save Me
56
Religulous
55
House Bunny, The
55
Ping Pong Playa
54
Hamlet 2
53
Quarantine
53
RocknRolla
53
Rocker, The
53
Lucky Ones, The
51
Mamma Mia!
51
Savage Grace
51
Holly
49
Children of Huang Shi, The
49
Family That Preys, The
47
Swing Vote
47
Lakeview Terrace
45
Pride and Glory
43
Eagle Eye
43
Death Race
40
Igor
36
Righteous Kill
35
Mirrors
34
My Best Friend's Girl
32
Repo! The Genetic Opera
31
Max Payne
31
Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, The
28
Fireproof
27
Women, The
26
Babylon A.D.
24
Bangkok Dangerous
20
American Carol, An
19
Saw V
16
Surfer, Dude
15
Disaster Movie
15
College
xx
Eden Lake
xx
Alphabet Killer, The
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Mamma Mia!
Universal Pictures
 |
|
MPAA RATING: PG-13 for some sex-related comments
Starring
Meryl Streep,
Pierce Brosnan,
Colin Firth,
Stellan Skarsgård,
Julie Walters,
Dominic Cooper,
Amanda Seyfried,
and
Christine Baranski
An independent, single mother who owns a small hotel on an idyllic Greek island, Donna is about to let go of Sophie, the spirited daughter she's raised alone. For Sophie's wedding, Donna has invited her two lifelong best girlfriends--practical and no-nonsense Rosie and wealthy, multi-divorcee Tanya--from her one-time backing band, Donna and the Dynamos. But Sophie has secretly invited three guests of her own. On a quest to find the identity of her father to walk her down the aisle, she brings back three men from Donna's past to the Mediterranean paradise they visited 20 years earlier. Over 24 chaotic, magical hours, new love will bloom and old romances will be rekindled on this lush island full of possibilities. (Universal Pictures)
| GENRE(S): |
Comedy
|
Musical
|
Romance
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Catherine Johnson
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Phyllida Lloyd
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: December 16, 2008
Theatrical: July 18, 2008
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
108 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
UK | USA |
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
100
The Hollywood Reporter
Ray Bennett
It's a delightful piece of filmmaking with a marvelous cast topped by Meryl Streep in one of her smartest and most entertaining performances ever.
88
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
The movie takes the ABBA jukebox musical that ate London, and is still eating Broadway, and turns it into a surprisingly sensuous experience.
88
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
The chorus backs the soloists powerfully, and they are as fresh as the rest of the film: fat and fit, homely and handsome, young gods and old codgers – in short, people you might really see in Greece. Reality in a musical? That alone makes it worth your open-eared attention.
75
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
Mamma Mia! is fun, the music's terrific and the cast is appealing.
75
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
An exuberant if not always brilliantly crafted adaptation of the campy ABBA musical.
75
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
It's airheaded just like the songs it embraces but, if you enjoy them, there's every reason to believe you'll appreciate the film.
75
USA Today
Claudia Puig
The good-natured silliness is contagious. When Streep runs singing through a Greek village, it's like a spirited homage to "The Sound of Music."
75
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
This is an actress (Streep) who can pull off anything -- including a shamelessly kitschy musical.
70
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
Yes, of course this is fairly old-fashioned entertainment, but it's really, really entertaining.
70
Slate
Dana Stevens
It makes bursting spontaneously into song seem like a perfectly reasonable--indeed, highly desirable--thing to do, and it leaves the audience wanting to do the same. I see a big uptick in late-summer karaoke parties.
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Liam Lacey
Taken for what it is – a fluffy, intergenerational farce as a frame for some seventies musical nostalgia – Mamma Mia! just gets away with it, in spite of director Lloyd's lack of cinematic inexperience.
63
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
As a story, Mamma Mia! is a sham, a narrative so rickety it makes "Grease" seem like Shakespeare. It fails as a musical, too, since only about half of the songs have any bearing on the scene that preceded them.
63
Premiere
Emily Rems
Before plunking down your cash for a ride on the Mamma Mia! express when it pulls into town, just ask yourself one question: Do I really dig ABBA?
60
Variety
Jordan Mintzer
Scribe-creator Catherine Johnson (also in her first screen outing) and theater-opera vet Lloyd can't seem to find the right tone or style for their globally celebrated material.
60
Empire
Angie Errigo
Cute, clean, camp fun, full of sunshine and toe tappers. Guaranteed to put grins on tweenies who are in to High School Musical, grans with a pair of platforms still at the back of the wardrobe, and a lot of people in between tone.
60
Time
Richard Corliss
By the end-credit sequence, when the stars appear in spandex outfits to reprise Dancing Queen, the audience may be singing along as if they'd overdosed on ouzo.
58
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
It's tempting to say that Mamma Mia! has the worst choreography of any big-screen musical in history, though that would imply that what happens in the film IS choreography.
50
Chicago Tribune
Michael Phillips
It's funny what you buy completely onstage and resist completely, or nearly, on-screen. Case in point: Mamma Mia!
50
Chicago Reader
J.R. Jones
All singing! All dancing! All squealing! The money-minting Broadway musical has been adapted into the year's most aggressive chick flick, with a score of irresistibly catchy ABBA tunes sweetening the dumb story like peaches in cottage cheese.
50
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Scott Tobias
The incongruous mix of real locations and stage sets, real voices and overdubs, is a constant distraction, while the choreography lumbers in group numbers and goes flat in more intimate ones.
50
Washington Post
Ann Hornaday
This is a movie guaranteed to please crowds, if only because it insists on their affection so strenuously.
50
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
Meryl Streep can do anything: sing, dance, do splits, act her heart out. She (almost) saves this clumsy, overwrought film version of the Abba musical that's been running on stages from Broadway to Barcelona since 1999.
50
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
This movie wasn't made for me. It was made for the people who will love it, of which there may be a multitude. The stage musical has sold 30 million tickets, and I feel like the grouch at the party.
50
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
By turns entertaining and excruciating.
50
The New York Times
A.O. Scott
You can have a perfectly nice time watching this spirited adaptation of the popular stage musical and, once the hangover wears off, acknowledge just how bad it is.
50
Village Voice
Ella Taylor
It's little more than droopy ditties draped around a threadbare plot.
50
Austin Chronicle
Kimberley Jones
I COULD do without "Dancing Queen" stuck in my head, but that will unstick soon enough, and with any luck so too will the memory of Streep noodling on an air guitar.
50
NPR
Bob Mondello
This plot is not being taken terribly seriously. It's mostly a pretext for songs that are mostly a pretext for acting silly.
50
New York Daily News
Elizabeth Weitzman
On the scale of modern musical adaptations, it's not a disaster of "The Producers" proportions. But it is missing the razzle-dazzle of a success like "Chicago."
50
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
Though the filmmakers may have been imagining they were re-creating the old days of MGM musicals, it's the Village People's misguided "Can't Stop the Music" that comes to mind instead.
50
TV Guide
Ken Fox
The direction is slack -- it's Lloyd's first feature film and it shows -- the choreography clumsy and every ten minutes there's yet another gratuitous showstopper shouting in your face and insisting you have a good time.
42
Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer
Poor Pierce Brosnan. Sport that he is, he does his level best to be a song-and-dance man but it's just not in him. He's touchingly awful. The same could probably be said for the entire movie.
42
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
Like a party where everyone is so desperate to have a good time that it makes you miserable.
40
New York Magazine
David Edelstein
Seyfried (of Big Love and Mean Girls) is a radiant object and can sing, but I'd like to forget the others--especially Brosnan, whose singing is the best imitation I've heard of a water buffalo.
30
The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
Ferocious onslaught of obligatory good cheer.
25
Portland Oregonian
M. E. Russell
I can see how Mamma Mia! might be a fun stage musical. As a movie musical, it's a train wreck.
20
Salon.com
Stephanie Zacharek
Watching Streep and her two BFFs, played by Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, grinning and giggling their way through Mamma Mia! I felt I was being thoroughly, and unenjoyably, punished.
 The average user rating for this movie is 7.5 (out of 10) based on 163 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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