Review by EW

Zac Efron may be the prettiest young actor in movies today — he’s like a preppy update of Shaun Cassidy in his teen-dream prime — but he also demonstrates that looks will get you only so far. As the title golden boy of Charlie St. Cloud, Efron plays a small-town competitive sailor whose beloved little brother, Sam (Charlie Tahan), gets killed in a car crash. (Charlie was at the wheel.) It doesn’t take long to figure out that Charlie dies too — at least in spirit. Instead of heading off to Stanford to realize his dream of becoming a sailing champion, he stays home, going to work at the local graveyard. He’s so ruled by guilt and despair that he imagines he’s talking to ghosts — like that of his late brother, whom he ”keeps alive” by meeting him every day at the exact same clearing in the woods to play baseball.

The surreal thing is, Zac Efron can’t do despair. He plays it by staring. Blankly. And by not smiling. Blankly.

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Review by the Village Voice

In a go-nowhere Pacific Northwest town, dreamy high school sailor Charlie (played mostly by Zac Efron’s abs and piercing gaze) puts his Stanford scholarship plans on indefinite hold after he momentarily flatlines in a car accident, which also takes his little brother, Sam (Charlie Tahan). Half a decade later, Charlie has sunk into a shy, brooding routine as a cemetery caretaker, and meets his dead bro in the woods every sunset to toss around a baseball.

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Review by Orlando Sentinel

There’s an unfussy confidence to Zac Efron’s acting, a physical ease on camera that doesn’t require mannerisms or tricks. He is slipping the bounds of high school musicals and dramas right before our eyes, and his screen presence is already more adult-masculine than Leonardo DiCaprio’s was at this age.

And if directors choose to shoot him in close-up, well, he can’t help if it he’s pretty.

Charlie St. Cloud ably packages Efron in a teen weeper, a transitional romance that takes the High School Musical star into his 20s, with adult concerns and emotional issues and a romance that accepts adult consequences. But it’s also a gimmicky glop of sentimental, Ghost meets The Sixth Sense. Charlie St. Cloud looses his kid brother, but finds love. If only he could stop playing catch with that kid brother every evening as the sun goes down.

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