Metacritic reviews

It tells a full story with three acts, it introduces characters we get to know and care about, and it has something it passionately wants to say.

Maybe this well-loved Luke is who his neighbors want him to be, a good fellow who, with his father, reopens the old movie house in town -- the Majestic -- thus allowing his neighbors to dream in the dark again.

A sweet, visually handsome sermon, but it's too dramatically bland to convert even the converted.

A pale imitation that challenges credulity and tries too hard to win our hearts with schmaltz.

It's too manufactured and deliberate to be persuasive.

The indisputably gifted Jim Carrey shows the side of him that just wants to be loved - the Riddler on Ritalin, the Mask unmasked. And it turns out to be stultifying.

The Majestic isn't. Rather it's "The Film That Wasn't There," a derivative, self-satisfied fable that couldn't be more treacly and simple-minded if it tried. And it tries, oh, how it tries.

I staggered out of this shameless, interminable movie feeling as if I'd been force-fed a ton of mealy, artificially sweetened baby food.

A mishmash of life-insurance commercials and Ronald Reagan campaign spots, this sexless orgy of self-congratulation is designed to make you feel good about Hollywood, America, and Jim Carrey -- not to mention the nation's motion picture exhibitors, who are praised at one point as the antithesis of Soviet Communism.

A thick slice of bogus inspirational cheese that only makes itself look bad by recycling so many golden movie memories.