Cats's reviews
Media reviews
Even after 110 tumbling, tail-swishing, deeply psychedelic minutes, it?s hard to know if you ever really knew anything ? except that C is for Cats, C is for Crazy, and C is probably the grade this cinematic lunacy deserves, in the sense of making any sense at all. And yet that somewhere under the Jellicle moonlight, it is somehow, too, an A++.
Empire
And most baffling of all: why do they look like that? The much-vaunted ?digital fur technology? has improved since the trailer, but never climbs from the shivering depths of the uncanny valley. Neither human nor cat, they all look like laboratory mutants put through a Snapchat filter. Your brain will never comprehend it. It?s jarring from the first minute and remains jarring until the last.
The Hollywood Reporter
As always, Cats is virtually plotless, more like a Ziegfeld Follies-type revue with a series of thinly connected specialty numbers than a narrative that invites much involvement. Cobbled together by Lloyd Webber and original stage director Trevor Nunn from the T.S. Eliot poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the musical gives new meaning to the word "twee." The screenplay by Hooper and Lee Hall has only heightened that.
Variety
From the first shot ? of just such a blue moon, distressingly fake, flanked by poufy cat-shaped clouds ? to the last, ?Cats? hurts the eyes and, yes, the ears, as nearly all the musical numbers, including ?Memory,? have been twisted into campy, awards-grubbing cameos for big-name stars in bad-CG cat drag.
Los Angeles Times
?I remember / the time I knew what happiness was,? Grizabella sings. You will remember it, too, and you will know it again once you have ascended to your own Heaviside Layer, located just beyond the light of the exit sign.
Festival Internacional de Cine de Lanzarote