Lake view terrace
>> Sunday, December 28, 2008
Critical reaction to Lakeview Terrace has been mixed. Rotten Tomatoes reported that 44% of critics gave positive reviews based on 125 reviews. On Metacritic, critics gave a 46% approval rating based on 28 reviews. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a very positive review, awarding it a score of four stars and saying: "Some will find it exciting. Some will find it an opportunity for an examination of conscience. Some will leave feeling vaguely uneasy. Some won't like it and will be absolutely sure why they don't, but their reasons will not agree. Some will hate elements that others can't even see. Some will only see a thriller. I find movies like this alive and provoking, and I'm exhilarated to have my thinking challenged at every step of the way."
Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle also enjoyed the film, giving it three stars out of four, saying: "In its overall shape and message, Lakeview Terrace is a conventional suspense thriller, but the details kick it up a notch. ... The fun of Lakeview Terrace is not in what happens but in how it happens." J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader called the film "one of the toughest racial dramas to come out of Hollywood since the fires died down—much tougher, for instance, than Paul Haggis's hand-wringing Oscar winner Crash."
Dennis Harvey of Variety said that Lakeview Terrace "delivers fairly tense and engrossing drama" but "succumb[s] to thriller convention."Anthony Lane of The New Yorker said that "the first hour of the film ... feels dangerous, necessary, and rife with comic disturbance," but added that "the later stages ... overheat and spill into silliness." James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave the film two stars out of four, saying that "the first two-thirds of Lakeview Terrace offer a little more subtlety and complexity than the seemingly straightforward premise would afford, but the climax is loud, dumb, generic, and over-the-top."
Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe said that "the movie might have something to say about black racism, but the conversations go nowhere, and the clichés of the genre take over." Sura Wood of The Hollywood Reporter said: "[The idea of] a black actor cast as the virulent bigot, with the object of his campaign of harassment the young interracial couple who move in next door, could be viewed as a novel twist. But the film, absent a sense of place and populated by repellent or weak characters, soon devolves into an increasingly foul litany of events."[10] Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal gave it one half of a star out of five, and called the film a "joyless and airless suspense thriller."
On its opening weekend, the film grossed $15 million placing it at #1 at the U.S. box office. As of November 2, 2008, the film has grossed $39.2 million domestically and $3.2 million internationally making $42.4 million worldwide.
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