Head in The Clouds - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

In his review in The New York Times, Stephen Holden said, "The strength of go-for-broke performance only underlines the weaknesses of the film . . . plays like an entertaining compilation of Hollywood's favorite World War II clichés" and added, "Could it be that Hollywood's six decades of replaying the Good War has left us with nobility fatigue? At least Head in the Clouds is not the debacle of Charlotte Gray and other epic-manqués. But if World War II is to continue to mean anything anymore, it has to be reimagined as a real event, not a deluxe, romantically spiced-up newsreel."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said the film "is silly and the plot is preposterous, but it labors under no delusions otherwise. It wants to be a hard-panting melodrama, with spies and sex and love and death, and there are times when a movie like this is exactly what you feel like indulging."

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Walter Addiego called it "a glossy, stiff melodrama . . . a mixture of Casablanca and Cabaret, or possibly Hemingway and Henry Miller, and finally, it doesn't work, in part because the erotic content seems self-conscious and force-fit. In fact, if not for the presence of Charlize Theron, it's hard to imagine this film would have attracted anywhere near the kind of attention it's gotten . . . she's not at all bad, but her role as a young American heiress and libertine feels recycled from scores of other movies."

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded it one out of a possible four stars and described it as "a World War II melodrama of epic silliness and supreme vapidity . . . This spark-free film has no place to go on resumes except under the heading of Cringing Embarrassment."