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Beetlejuice Reviews

This film is heaven – perhaps the only kind of heaven open to us these days, a non-transcendental heaven constituted wholly of material exchanges between energy-sources, memory banks, particles of popular culture.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 30, 2025

Much of what would become the Burton aesthetic came to prominence with this film.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 6, 2025

In 1988, Michael Keaton needed only 17 minutes to create one of the best and weirdest characters in Hollywood history.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 19, 2024

A wonderfully weird horror comedy from director Tim Burton, Beetlejuice invites the audience to have as much fun as its clearly having.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 9, 2024

The film still works and is just as charming and engaging as it was when I watched it as a kid. Michael Keaton is iconic, and Ryder, Baldwin, Davis and O’Hara all excel in their roles (the less said about Jeffrey Jones the better). Full review in Spanish.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 6, 2024

What more frightening than being dead? Being slogged down by bureaucracy and forced to read a handbook or facing the lecherous mayhem of a bio-exorcist? This is a fun and quirky look at death and the problems of the recently deceased.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2024

In a movie landscape where so much can feel disposable in how it plays safe and toes the line, we can be glad that we'll always have the maniac that is Beetlejuice.

Full Review | Sep 6, 2024

Burton’s off-the-wall imagining of a bureaucratically mired afterlife that looks for all the world like a back-alley doctor’s dubious practice, drunk on petrol fumes and too much Dali, was gloriously surreal.

Full Review | Sep 6, 2024

Although Burton’s sensibilities are offbeat and his humor verges on the macabre, this outing is not inaccessible to the mainstream. There’s an oddball charm to the proceedings...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 5, 2024

The film is a creative triumph, with amazing characters and boundless background details that flesh out the world.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 4, 2024

…at least it's short and doesn’t overstay its welcome, and is full of cheaply-realised but undeniable visual imagination…it’s just that Beetlejuice’s seedy game-show host/frat-boy humour looks fairly dubious in 2024...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 3, 2024

I found it quite entertaining. The jokes for the most part work and the creepy atmosphere is effective.

Full Review | Sep 3, 2024

Tim Burton's dizzyingly weird horror-comedy marked the high point of his early career, before soulless remakes became his calling card. Here's hoping the sequel matches its subversive energy.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 2, 2024

The peculiarity of its title, characters and the story has that one-of-a-kind, unique charm only [Tim] Burton could come up with.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 1, 2024

Like his first film, Burton's second effort is clever, colorful and short enough not to challenge one's patience.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 22, 2024

Ultimately, the special effects and wacky premise weigh down the story and turn the movie into something akin to an overlong carnival ride.

Full Review | Aug 22, 2024

You have to admire the nutty gutsiness of its puerile purity, even if most of it passes over the border from silly into foolish.

Full Review | Aug 22, 2024

If this unapologetically silly movie falters when the grab bag of visual tricks threatens to tear, it is propped up by the many giddy performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 22, 2024

At the end, you feel exhilarated, because the cunning way Burton works is part of the joke. His innocent deviousness lifts you up high, like helium.

Full Review | Aug 22, 2024

The filmmakers parcel out the horrific gags so tirelessly they lose sight of the tale they're telling.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 22, 2024

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