Critics reviews

Stone sometimes loads the narrative with too much sub-Freudian baggage about Morrison's childhood, but the music, the excess and the excitement come across well; there are splendid cameos of the likes of Warhol and the Velvet Underground's Nico.

[The Doors is] a bloated, pompous, unbalanced film, which looks great but has nothing going on beneath the surface. This is the biopic Jim Morrison deserved.

Oliver Stones hallucinatory psychodrama biopic of rock god/poet Jim Morrison goes further than most cinematic memoirs of artists in confronting its subject's destructive impulses while glorifying his creative energy. Val Kilmer is extraordinary as Morrison, holding the centre with a demonic charisma, while Stone recreates the late '60s milieu with vibrant versimilitude.

Whatever reservations one may have about this exhausting, dark-side-of-the-’60s epic, there can be little doubt that Stone has captured a particular, bombs-away brand of rock & roll excess with definitive candor.

[The Doors] is a wildly uneven work in which Stone focuses so strongly on Morrison and the forces that both drove and destroyed him that almost nothing else in the film--from historical accuracy to supporting characters--seemed to matter. It’s a serious flaw that neutralizes to a large extent the brilliance of the concert sequences and leaves us with a film spectacle that is simultaneously glorious but hollow.

Two things are certain [about The Doors]: Mr. Stone retains his ability to grab an audience by the throat and sustain that hold for hours, without interruption. And he has succeeded in raising the dead.

Watching [The Doors] is like being stuck in a bar with an obnoxious drunk, when you’re not drinking... [Val Kilmer's] performance is the best thing in the movie - and since nearly every scene centers on Morrison, that is not small praise.

Like Morrison, Stone is not quite the avant-garde artist he envisions himself being; he has a higher talent for mastering popular art and the system, while smashing or scorning its laws and dodges. Stone isn’t immaculate, and neither is “The Doors”... But it’s one hell of a ride and a real, roaring rock movie.

[The Doors] is everything one expects from [Oliver Stone] – intense, overblown, riveting, humorless, evocative, self-important and impossible to ignore.