Release and Reception
Reign Over Me currently holds a 63% "Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes. General praise has been awarded to the performances of Sandler and Cheadle, with many reviews also praising Binder's direction and screenplay, but the film was not nominated for any major awards. The film opened in 1,671 theaters with a $4,465 per theater average, giving it a total gross of $7.5 million for the weekend. It ended its theatrical run with a domestic total of $19.7 million and an international total of $1.2 million, making a total gross of $20.9 million.
Reviews for the film were mixed to positive. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 61, based on 33 reviews, which indicates "Generally favorable" reviews. Entertainment Weekly gives Reign Over Me a B− rating, calling the film "a strange, black-and-blue therapeutic drama equally mottled with likable good intentions and agitating clumsiness." Reviewer Lisa Schwarzbaum shares her own discomfort with seeing the September 11 attacks casually included as a plot device in a fictional drama, while praising the film's performance and story.
The New York Times found the film "maddeningly uneven", adding, "It's rare to see so many moments of grace followed by so many stumbles and fumbles, or to see intelligence and discretion undone so thoroughly by glibness and grossness. And it is puzzling, and ultimately draining, to see a film that waves the flag of honesty—Face your demons! Speak from your heart! Open up!—turn out to be so phony."
The video gaming blog Kotaku praised Reign Over Me's inclusion of the video game Shadow of the Colossus, stating that it "must be one of the first Hollywood films, if not the first, to deal with games thematically and intelligently."
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