Metacritic reviews

Tells a light-hearted fictional story and creates a maze of imaginative animation and special effects to illustrate how the heavier thoughts of the science apply to the everyday world.

Think of it as "The Matrix" for the quantum physics set.

What the Bleep Do We Know? is both modern science for dummies and a feisty extension of our ongoing religious debate.

Pic's not-so-hidden agenda is to promote the fusion of science and New Age religion, making it a close cousin to ventures as Bernt and Fritjof Capra's "Mindwalk."

As entertainment, the movie is a mixed bag. Some of the talking heads become just that after a while.

Matlin's haphephobic character dry-swallows anti-anxiety pills only in instances of extreme duress, but the actress herself looks pained throughout the movie, wincing reflexively at inappropriate moments.

In the age of creationism, a sympathetic mix of science and religion sounds like a promising premise. But in this genre-blending cocktail of drama, documentary and computer-graphic animation, quantum physics is so subordinated to the service of an anything-goes mysticism that little remains of the science except the terminology.

Darts around maniacally before congealing around a touchy-feely message of personal empowerment whose secular humanism and moral relativism is bound to strike fundamentalists of all stripes as downright Satanic.

The biggest puzzlement about "What'' is what it's doing in major movie theaters around the country when it so clearly belongs on one of those small cable channels given to peculiar programming.

The film treats its audience like fidgety junior-high schoolers, piling on the sub-Koyaanisqatsi cityscapes and cheesy episodes with Marlee Matlin as a lonely photographer, plus bouncy cartoons of human cells who look as if they'd be happier chasing stains in bathroom-cleanser commercials.