Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

This is a dark, dark, dark film, focused on an obsession so complete and lonely it shuts out all other human experience. You may not savor it, but you will not stop watching it, in horror and fascination.

Charlotte Observer by Lawrence Toppman

Most horror movies try to show us the man inside the monster, so we'll empathize with his moral dilemmas or feel his suffering. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer shows us a man who is all monster, whose colossal amorality makes him a potential Messiah or menace to humanity.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer by William Arnold

The film is downright repulsive in places, and otherwise pushes the envelope for an art film, but it's a dazzling piece of filmmaking that wins us over with its boldness and artistry.

Portland Oregonian by Marc Mohan

Whishaw's oddly charismatic performance makes the despicable Grenouille into an almost sympathetic antihero. The rather astonishing finale will likely have audiences either howling in derision or ardently dissecting afterward. And it must have given the bluenoses at the MPAA fits.

Empire by Dan Jolin

The odd conclusion renders it somewhat oblique, but Perfume is a feast for the senses.

Film Threat by Rick Kisonak

Tykwer makes of all this murder and madness a concoction of improbable beauty and rare artistry. "Perfume" is not just the finest film of his career but easily one of the past year's most accomplished.

Premiere by Ethan Alter

Perfume is sure to annoy as many moviegoers as it entertains, but at least even the naysayers would find it difficult to argue that film is nothing if not a departure from the ordinary.

New York Daily News by Jack Mathews

This is a crazy, gorgeous, disturbing, darkly comic horror story about an early-18th-century Frenchman born in a Paris fish market without any odor of his own but with a sense of smell that would make a pack of bloodhounds wail with envy.

New York Post by Lou Lumenick

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, crosses over from thriller into magic realism for a lavishly staged climax that's a bit much.

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Perfume misses some of the subtler base notes of Süskind's creepier, more self-aware original, but Whishaw and Tykwer blend the movie into something quite heady in its own bottle.

The Hollywood Reporter

Long regarded as unfilmable, Patrick Suskind's 1985 novel "Perfume" has finally reached the screen in a blockbuster production that succeeds reasonably well in achieving what many said was beyond the scope of cinema: conveying the world of scent and smell.

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

A memorable and outrageous movie, but one more likely to be remembered as a massive folly than a whopping success.

Variety by Derek Elley

The seductive, sensory prose of Patrick Suskind's bestseller, "Perfume," reaches the screen with loads of visual panache but only intermittent magic.

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

Deeply flawed though it may be, Perfume is a challenging motion picture, and one whose impressions are not easily shaken.

Village Voice

It's a noble experiment in pushing the limits of cinema, but Tykwer never achieves true profundity.

The A.V. Club by Nathan Rabin

Perfume is ultimately an unmistakable failure, but there's a strange majesty to its epic overreaching. It can be faulted for many things, but not for lacking the courage of its convictions.

Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern

Weaves a sensual spell of extraordinary delicacy, then sustains it -- up to a point.

Los Angeles Times by Carina Chocano

What's missing is less a sense of the protagonist's inner nose (which is very well-trammeled) as a sense of his inner life, motivation or desire.

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

Try as it might to be refined and provocative, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer never rises above the pedestrian creepiness of its conceit.