Cloverfield

There is no narration. There is no musical score before the closing credits. And there are no big-name stars, though the leads do a fine job of flipping out in cramped places.

Cloverfield means to tap into our semi-permanent state of heightened alert, deliberately evoking 9/11 to remind us that terror is never as far away as we'd like to think.

It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand.

Despite the presence of mind-twisting, building-tall monsters, Cloverfield is the most intimate, familiar monster movie ever made.

Cloverfield is the most intense and original creature feature I've seen in my adult moviegoing life, and that's coming from a guy who knows his Gojira from his Gamera and his Harryhausen from his Honda.

This is the giant-monster movie reinvented and reinvigorated for our time. All hail the new Godzilla.

At its best, this gritty New York take on go-go Godzilla conjures the frantic energy and vivid, anxious wonderment of a waking nightmare.

Clever storytelling and an appealing cast make this update of cheap Godzilla-style flicks modern, scary and superfun.

Cloverfield, a surreptitiously subversive, stylistically clever little gem of an entertainment disguised, under its deadpan-neutral title, as a dumb Gen-YouTube monster movie.

Cloverfield isn't the staggering work of genius the prerelease hype makes it out to be, but it is a solid thrill ride.

The first great monster movie for the YouTube generation, Cloverfield captures New York, mid-destruction, with a startling, breathless urgency that legitimately deserves to be called a wild ride.

For a short film with a no-name cast and a B-movie premise, Cloverfield has some truly fiendish ways of getting under your skin.

After months of cryptic trailers and postmodern stealth hype, Cloverfield turns out to be almost comforting in its simplicity.

Mercifully, at 84 minutes the movie is even shorter than its originally alleged 90-minute running time; how much visual shakiness can we take?

It's dumb but quick and dirty and effectively brusque, dispensing with niceties such as character.

By staying true to its premise and finding clever ways to pad out its relatively brief length, the movie delivers more than a few jolts and shivers.

If a lot of its enjoyment rests on a gimmick, it's still a very good gimmick and the filmmakers make the most of it.

While the filmmakers borrow from the hand-held scrutiny of The Blair Witch Project, they have a better budget for tools to pull off the characters' obsessive self-surveillance.

At less than 90 minutes, it's a lean, mean monster movie -- even if it's gimmicky filmmaking makes it an acquired taste.

If Godzilla were to knock up Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield would be their spawn. It’s not quite as groundbreaking as those two, but the movie is definitely ground-shaking -- partly from viewers trembling in their seats.

Godzilla meets YouTube in Cloverfield, a cheesy idea that gets a huge boost from the immediacy of its style.

There are a few surprises lurking in Cloverfield, and director Matt Reeves has an uncanny ability to time his jolts and scare when you least expect it.

Cloverfield is here to assure us that, should such a dark day ever arrive, there will be at least one meathead in the crowd who will throw caution to the wind and record the entire event for posterity.

The genius of this otherwise low-budget project is in the computer-animated effects.

The movie keeps us off balance and on edge. We never know where the monster is going to turn up next or exactly what it's supposed to be.

Cloverfield successfully takes the monster genre up a couple of notches. Directed by Matt Reeves, it delivers a shot of terrifying intensity that'll keep viewers trembling in their seats.

A film that delivers a clever twist on perhaps the oldest sci-fi/horror staple of all: The Giant Monster Movie.

Cloverfield is a modern-day Godzilla, as loaded with Saturday-matinee shocks and underlying allegories as the Japanese classic -- but with a layer of meta-media gloss that's too clever for its own good.

This may be the first big-budget Hollywood picture in history to go to so much trouble trying to look like crap.

Cloverfield doesn't waste much time before it starts shaking you like a rag doll and never letting up.

The first thing you need to get used to in Cloverfield is the potentially nausea-inducing shaky camera work, which makes The Blair Witch Project look like the latest Ken Burns documentary.

The tension is flawlessly maintained, but the problem with one-note films is that eventually that note goes flat.

Cloverfield so smartly reconjures the 1950s monster movie for the digital age, it's sad to report the film's one big dumb mistake: the beast itself.

Though it has a gimmicky high concept, Cloverfield is a surprisingly gripping thriller. Employing a pseudo-documentary handheld camera style, it offers a fresh spin on the monster movie genre.

The destruction looks good and believable in a disaster movie kind of way. There is a bang to the buck for people who just want to see some buildings get smashed.

Monster movies aren't generally known to be wildly intelligent, but Cloverfield is smarter than the genre usually allows.

In the best way possible, the long-awaited, shrouded-in-mystery monster movie Cloverfield is basically an anthology of bad decisions.

Cloverfield is The Blair Witch Project for the post-Sept. 11 generation, a first-person, hand-held camera exploration of terror that's long on style and technique, short on substance and plot.

A Godzilla for the MySpace generation, is sure to draw cheers from those pre-converted by the hype and jeers from the emperor-has-no-clothes crowd.

Much scampering, yelling, quaking and crying is required of the actors, and they acquit themselves well enough, even with oozing fake wounds and prop rebars piercing their shoulder blades.

The film trades in on post-9/11 anxieties with considerable success. What it doesn't do is much of anything else.

Cloverfield arrives in theaters more marketing phenomenon than movie, a Blair Godzilla Project built on an unknown cast, "found video," a little-seen monster and a lot of hype.

It's the disaster movie of the YouTube age, a creature feature made for a generation so stuck between shameless exhibitionism and hermetic self-absorption that it can only share by upload.

Take away its faux-low budget style -- which grows old quickly -- and you have a more frenetic, more populated version of I Am Legend.

Cloverfield combines unpleasantness and stupidity to a degree that would be difficult to match unless you were stuck in bed with a case of the shingles while being forced to watch The Ghost Whisperer.

Cloverfield has one strong element: the sound of fear, destruction and chaos.

After an expertly executed marketing campaign anchored in secrecy, the Cloverfield monster is finally out of the proverbial bag, and lo and behold…it's a monster!

The best thing about Cloverfield is that everyone involved agreed to end it after 75 minutes.

Cloverfield is just another monster movie, one that would play a lot better if it didn't ask us to take it so seriously.

Nearly a decade after The Blair Witch Project opened and closed the book on "found footage" faux-documentary horror movies, along comes Cloverfield, a pale and pointless imitation that brings nothing new to the table.

Cloverfield is a non-stop smashfest meant to be forgotten as soon as it's over, then repeated the following weekend for people eternally hungry for empty sensations.