Metacritic reviews

Crossing Over is so eager to go for the emotional jugular that it never quite forges an enlightening point of view.

Enough things in Crossing Over work to keep the film from becoming a bore, but this is a definite step down from Kramer's past efforts, "The Cooler" and "Running Scared."

Writer-director Wayne Kramer adds what could be called mainstream threads to his messy script, but the result is simplistic across the board.

There are a bunch of other clunky immigrant subplots (the Jews get a comic one, the Turks a scary one), but it isn't until the massacre–cum–civics tutorial in the liquor store that Crossing Over crosses into the mythic realm of camp. What a waste. I still say it's better than "Crash," though.

The film plays like a garish melodrama that reproduces the most ham-fisted, polemical aspects of "Crash."

The way the picture dwells almost exclusively on cinematically exploitable elements -- gangbanger crime, prostitution, honor killing, terrorism paranoia -- gives it a sordid patina that even the classy, able thesps can't offset.

And so it goes, with Kramer--who doesn't really seem to like people very much--failing to muster even the superficial empathy the makers of the similarly programmatic "The Visitor" and "Rendition" showed toward their own cardboard-cutout imperiled illegals.

All of its plot threads are equally dreadworthy.

Forced, heavy-handed and overdone, it's a pretend serious film that offers crass manipulation in the place where honesty is supposed to be.

Wayne Kramer's interlocking saga of immigration in 21st-century America definitely crosses over, from workaday mediocrity to distinctive dreadfulness.