Bellflower 2011

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: Handmade and helpless, it's nevertheless the real deal, an artful blurt of sensitivity and rage. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Bellflower is stylishly watchable - even when it's preposterous. Read more

James Rocchi, MSN Movies: It's warm and beautiful and terrible and scary, full of heart and blood and truly unique. Read more

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: There's more here than initially meets and sometimes assaults the eye, including the hyperbolic dudeness of it all. Read more

David Fear, Time Out: In one grease-monkey swoop, Glodell proves that he's a subversive talent worth following. Let a thousand of his future projects bloom. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: A daring feature debut by Evan Glodell, "Bellflower" looks like it was shot with the digital equivalent of a Brownie box camera, and generates an almost palpable aura of anxiety. Read more

Tom Keogh, Seattle Times: Equally fascinating and tedious, "Bellflower" is a lost cause of a movie, torn apart by incompatible ambitions. Read more

Keith Phipps, AV Club: It is, without a doubt, a striking debut. But it's also punishingly distasteful and disjointed almost beyond coherence, a repetitive heap of a film that feels disgorged rather than crafted. Read more

Noel Murray, AV Club: The over-the-top, disjointed climax -- seen largely from the perspective of a character with brain damage -- will likely shoo away anyone who's not on-board with the film after the first hour, but I admired the bravura of it. Read more

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: "Bellflower," writer, director and star Evan Glodell's debut, bursts at the seams with wild creativity. Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: It offers hope that original storytelling is still out there, lurking in the darkness, just waiting for a massive flamethrower to light it up. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: It's like the world's coolest iPhone camera app writ large, and while it'd be misleading to make too much of this picture, it'd be a shame to make too little of it, either. Read more

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: Bellflower is weirdly gorgeous. Its intentional post-romanticism is mirrored in evocative chapter headings and ace cinematographer Joel Hodge's images (using a camera of the director's tweaking). Read more

Eric D. Snider, Film.com: Glodell took incredible risks as a filmmaker, telling a completely unorthodox story in a wholly audacious manner. Read more

John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter: Evan Glodell's uncategorizable debut mixes messy romance and ill-advised D.I.Y. obsessions into a knotty but compelling vision of pop culture-damaged youth. Read more

Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times: This frequently dazzling, eccentric portrait of mutually assured destruction is that most delirious of combos: charmingly funny and emotionally terrifying. Read more

Richard Brody, New Yorker: An agonizingly intense, almost unbearably beautiful first feature from the writer-director Evan Glodell. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: As the guys' favorite character from "The Road Warrior" might say: Too much violence, and too much pain, but there is within it some sort of honorable compromise. Read more

V.A. Musetto, New York Post: Glodell is a filmmaker with a future, if the apocalypse doesn't get in the way. Read more

Tirdad Derakhshani, Philadelphia Inquirer: A delightfully strange hybrid creature. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: Possibly represents the debut of a one-of-a-kind filmmaker, a natural driven by wild energy, like Tarantino. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Evan Glodell's explosive debut feature is a thing of toxic beauty. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: Sometimes that works well and sometimes it works poorly, but Bellflower is a genuine breakthrough, and after its own profoundly flawed fashion, a work of genius. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Glodell doesn't have the emotional intelligence or filmmaking finesse of the early Martin Scorsese, but his film is a new-millennium descendant of "Mean Streets." Read more

Jennie Punter, Globe and Mail: Bellflower revs the engine of an exciting new maverick. Read more

Jordan Riefe, TheWrap: Read more

John Anderson, Variety: A likely cult hit among horror fans and a gleeful affront to more delicate sensibilities. Read more

Rob Nelson, Village Voice: Writer-director-actor Evan Glodell's testosterone-fueled fever-dream indie Bellflower impresses less for its screeching take on extended adolescent fury than for its own macho, wacko, pedal-to-metal embodiment of same. Read more

Karina Longworth, L.A. Weekly: Bellflower is a mess, but one that's unquestionably the product of incredible ambition and potential. Read more

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post: After a while, "Bellflower" feels like it can't stop checking itself out in the mirror. It's a pose, not a movie. Read more