Metacritic reviews

Although Instinct is strictly a Hollywood formula picture, it's such an efficiently executed one, built around two such outstanding actors, that for the most part you won't mind.

A perfect example of how solid directing and good acting can almost redeem a derivative story.

The medium is more palatable than the saccharine message because Hopkins and Gooding know how to put on a show.

The warning against actors playing with dogs or children should be expanded to include men in gorilla suits.

A mushy-headed, unintentionally funny inspirational drama that plays like a clumsy attempt to crossbreed "The Shawshank Redemption" and "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest."

You could be forgiven for thinking -- occasionally -- that you just stumbled into "The Silence of the Apes."

If there's anything worse than a movie hammered together out of pieces of bad screenplays, it's a movie made from the scraps of good ones.

The audience will respond better to ENTERTAINMENT than a club to the head.

Never mind that the film's portrayal of the mentally ill is on a par with "There's Something About Mary" -- the clumsy moral that we were all better off as hunters and gatherers couldn't be sillier.

In search of inspiration and the human spirit triumphant, they managed to cook up a pot of sanctimonious, reductive claptrap (which the credits confess was only "inspired" by Quinn's book) that's not in the least instructive or entertaining.