Metacritic reviews

The Matrix slams you back in your chair, pops open your eyes and leaves your jaw hanging slack in amazement.

The Wachowskis do it so playfully well, keeping The Matrix's potentially confusing plot intelligible, intelligent, and suspenseful, that it doesn't matter.

Bill Pope's swooping, noir-inflected cinematography is wonderfully complemented by Owen Paterson's inventive production design, a great soundtrack and the best fight choreography this side of Hong Kong. And even if this isn't "Blade Runner," it is very cool shit.

Kinetic, atmospheric, visually stunning, and mind-bending.

There's a kind of liberating, almost transforming energy in this film; it lights you up and sends you out all giddy with silliness.

Doesn't just raise the bar on sci-fi and action films, it rips that sucker off and sends it spiraling into the sun.

The plot switches gears every time it threatens to run out of energy, which keeps the show as lively as it is preposterous.

Aerves up so much visual wizardry and thought-provoking ideas that even the inevitable Silver touch -- a finale with more bullets than the opening of "Saving Private Ryan" -- can't destroy the magic.

It may bore you to death or blow your mind -- and it's long and convoluted enough to do both -- but it holds nothing back.

There's not much humor to keep it all life-size, and by the final stretch it's become bloated, mechanical, and tiresome.