Movie · 2008 · Action, Thriller, Science Fiction · 1h 25m · PG-13 · English
Curator score: 4.5/10 (867.1K ratings)
Some thing has found us.
Overview
Five young New Yorkers throw their friend a going-away party the night that a monster the size of a skyscraper descends upon the city. Told from the point of view of their video camera, the film is a document of their attempt to survive the most surreal, horrifying event of their lives.
Ratings
Curator score: 4.5/10
IMDb: 7.0/10
Letterboxd: 3.41/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 78%
Metacritic: 64
TMDB: 6.7/10
Director
Matt Reeves
Production
Bad Robot
Cast
Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller, Michael Stahl-David, Mike Vogel, Odette Annable, Anjul Nigam, Margot Farley, Theo Rossi, Brian Klugman, Kelvin Yu, Liza Lapira, Lili Mirojnick, Ben Feldman, Elena Nikitina Bick, Vakisha Coleman, Will Greenberg, Rob Kerkovich, Ryan Key, Hooman Khalili
Curator Review
Verdict
A high-energy, found-footage monster movie that turns a citywide catastrophe into a tense, disorienting survival ride. It’s especially effective if you like disaster cinema with a strong sense of immediacy, mystery, and post-9/11 unease.
Best for
viewers who enjoy found-footage or handheld realism
fans of monster movies with minimal exposition
people interested in post-9/11 urban disaster stories
audiences who like short, propulsive thrillers
Skip if
you dislike shaky-cam cinematography
you want clear monster action and full visual reveals
you prefer character-driven horror over chaos and spectacle
you get motion-sick from handheld filming
Overview
Cloverfield is less interested in explaining its monster than in trapping you inside the panic of not knowing. The handheld format gives the destruction a nasty immediacy, making every street-level scramble feel chaotic, intimate, and weirdly plausible. It’s a disaster movie built out of fragments: phone calls, running feet, collapsing buildings, and the terrible silence between bursts of noise.
Worth noting
What gives it staying power is how sharply it captures the feeling of a city suddenly becoming unrecognizable. The film’s emotional core is simple but effective, using a party-gone-wrong setup to ground the spectacle in friendship, loss, and confusion. It’s messy by design, but that mess is part of the point.
Bottom line
The movie won’t work for everyone, especially if you need clean action geography or hate shaky camerawork. But as a time-capsule of 2000s anxiety and a lean, efficient creature feature, it remains one of the more distinctive studio blockbusters of its era.
Top Letterboxd reviews
tawni─ ⊹ ⊱ ☆ ⊰ ⊹ ─ (3.5★) · 5476 likes
the best part in this movie is when tj miller shuts the fuck up
gaia (2.5★) · 3088 likes
camera battery goals
esther · 2986 likes
Still the best film ever made about 9/11 -- about the 21st century -- Cloverfield is an unparalleled expressionist masterpiece. People talked about how it ripped its "don't show the monster" technique from Jaws, but it's closer to Lovecraft than anything else. Furthermore, it's an idea wholly indebted to the film's own era. We're afraid of what we don't know, what we can't see. Films like War of the Worlds come close to touching on post-9/11 anxieties so potently, but… more Still the best film ever made about 9/11 -- about the 21st century -- Cloverfield is an unparalleled expressionist masterpiece. People talked about how it ripped its "don't show the monster" technique from Jaws, but it's closer to Lovecraft than anything else. Furthermore, it's an idea wholly indebted to the film's own era. We're afraid of what we don't know, what we can't see. Films like War of the Worlds come close to touching on post-9/11 anxieties so potently, but… more
Josh Lewis (4★) · 1999 likes
"It's about moments, man. That's all that matters."
Much has been said already about the film's expert handling of post-9/11 anxieties. The way it lingers on people standing still in the wake of disaster, shocked & aimless, looking around, taking cellphone pictures as they try and comprehend an event they'll never fully understand; as reflected in Reeves' filmmaking, they'll never have anything more than a few, brief pieces of information sans context. But the thing that's managed to stick with me… more