To Die For

88%

Tomatometer

65 Reviews

66%

Popcornmeter

25,000+ Ratings

Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) is a weather reporter at her small-town cable station, but she dreams of being a big-time news anchor. However, she feels that her middle-class husband (Matt Dillon) is holding her back, so she decides to have him murdered. For this, she enlists Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix), a high school boy who is enamored with her. The plan doesn't work exactly as she intended, though, and her husband's family starts to suspect that she was involved in his death.

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Critics Consensus

Smart, funny, and thoroughly well-cast, To Die For takes a sharp - and sadly prescient - stab at dissecting America's obsession with celebrity.

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Critics Reviews

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Jake Cole

Slant Magazine

In the way it cavorts with teen melodrama, black comedy, and docu-realism to reflect Suzanne’s contradictory masks, To Die For is a comic precursor to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant.

Mar 22, 2024

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Anthony Lane

The New Yorker

The film, adapted by Buck Henry from Joyce Maynard’s novel, is smartly structured, but Van Sant’s touch is uncertain: the story’s satirical bite begins to loosen as his camera lingers more and more on the disaffected teen-agers.

Jun 12, 2023

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Manohla Dargis

Spin

Furiously paced and sharply funny, To Die For doesn't try for subtlety; its laughs are delivered with self-consciously heavy hands.

Dec 27, 2022

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David Harris

Spectrum Culture

Without Suzanne Stone, there would be no Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian. And now, with social media, we can curate and broadcast our own existence – imagined or otherwise.

Aug 20, 2024

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James Kendrick

Q Network Film Desk

first and foremost an exercise in bold style, with Van Sant throwing out the traditional playbook and thereby turning what might have otherwise been a Lifetime-esque potboiler into a thrilling, darkly humorous cinematic experiment

Rated: 3.5/4

May 21, 2024

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Jeff Beck

The Blu Spot

Boasts an impressive cast that includes three future Oscar winners and a tale of unbridled ambition that could've made for a riveting experience, but sadly it's all undone by a rather inexplicable, puzzling structure that reveals far too much too early.

Rated: 3/5

Apr 2, 2024

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Audience Reviews

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Farah R The positive reviews and compelling cast misled me to watching this utterly dull film. Despite Kidman’s excellent performance, my mind kept wandering and I couldn’t get invested in the plot or the characters. The strange editing choice of abruptly switching between scenes was annoying, and the gist of the story was predictable. This is not one I’d recommend. Rated 2/5 Stars • Rated 2 out of 5 stars 09/19/24 Full Review Alan g Nicole Kidman is beautiful as usual but the plot is sick and twisted. Would be better if she seduced a man not a teen but that has been done to death (pun intended). Rated 2/5 Stars • Rated 2 out of 5 stars 08/12/24 Full Review Karen R I gave this movie a good 30 minutes but sadly it didn't inspire me to watch any more... it clearly showed what the ending would be (yes I did fast forward to the end after writing the review) This movie had very little say that was anything other than trite and no characters worthy of spending any time watching. Rated 0.5/5 Stars • Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 06/28/24 Full Review Test T I tried to watch this on DVD recently. I say tried because my mind started wandering after about 20 minutes because of the odd way the movie is structured. It leaps between past, present and future story lines at will, and from biography, documentary, news feature, crime thriller, love story and probably others seemingly at random. I found the presentation very irritating and distracting. I like to get a good grasp of a storyline by following the lead characters on their main thread, but this film won't let you do that. Instead, it leaves clues all around like scattering jigsaw pieces for you to put together later. I didn't like it at all, and now I'm writing the review instead of watching the movie which says it all! I might be being unfair, so I am going to give it a neutral rating for now. I'm going to try and watch it again at some point when I have more patience, and see if I can appreciate it more, but for now it's a confusing mess I can't recommend. Rated 2.5/5 Stars • Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 04/18/24 Full Review Ava S To Die For played it a bit safer than one might desire, but it remains an enticingly satirical exploration of the fixation on fame and narcissism, laced with dark comedy. Rated 3.5/5 Stars • Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/08/24 Full Review Alec B Kidman's performance is perfect, equal parts terrifying and hilarious. This might be the only portrait of a psychopath where the psychopath is not some cunning genius, but a rather vacuous moron. Rated 4/5 Stars • Rated 4 out of 5 stars 11/10/23 Full Review Read all reviews

To Die For

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Cast & Crew

Gus Van Sant Director Nicole Kidman Suzanne Stone Maretto Matt Dillon Larry Maretto Joaquin Phoenix Jimmy Emmett Casey Affleck Russel Hines Illeana Douglas Janice Maretto

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To Die For

To Die For: Official Clip - Arresting the Teen Killers