Detachment 2011

Mary F. Pols, TIME Magazine: Everywhere you turn in Detachment, someone is trying to make you feel like hell. Read more

Stephen Holden, New York Times: Even at its most ludicrous - when it is shouting into your ear - its sheer audacity grabs your attention. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: The movie is one big scream, cliched and hardly credible as an oblique call to civility. Read more

Sam Adams, AV Club: Kaye frequently flirts with familiar tropes, but here, he takes them in a loving embrace, betraying a rank sentimentality the film otherwise avoids. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Brody, as the semi-fallen idealist, has a haggard eloquence, and Tim Blake Nelson, Christina Hendricks, and James Caan, as his colleagues, act out a bitterly funny spectrum of desolation. Read more

Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter: Harrowing depiction of the American educational system features a superb performance by Adrien Brody. Read more

Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times: There's something weirdly effective about the artistic desperation, which includes inserts of chalkboard animation and to-the-camera testimonials. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: A loud, grating wallow in dime-store despair. Read more

Anthony Lane, New Yorker: The movie works, and, though it cries out against so much, you sense that the one thing it does not cry is wolf. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: It wants to be an expose of the pervasive horrors of modern life. Instead, it just forces us to detach as well. Read more

Ella Taylor, NPR: [Brody] is undermined by a bloated script (from Carl Lund, a former public-school teacher) that lumbers him with bloviating asides about how we have failed our children. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: It's nice to see righteous anger in a movie. If only the education drama "Detachment" knew what to do with it. Read more

Kyle Smith, New York Post: "Detachment" quickly gets stuck in its own world-weariness. Read more

Rex Reed, New York Observer: Adrien Brody, one of the weirdest looking actors of the millennium, plays Henry Barthes, a man so emotionally blocked by a lifetime of disillusion that he cannot connect with any other human being. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Detachment gets to you. It hits hard. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: Despite many nameable flaws, [it] is a wrenching and powerful achievement... Read more

Rick Groen, Globe and Mail: The film is guilty of reverse sentimentality, where the relentless unhappiness comes to seem as manufactured and artificial as the schmaltz in a romcom. Read more

Linda Barnard, Toronto Star: Detachment gets an A for enthusiasm but a C for execution. Read more

Ronnie Scheib, Variety: Brody is brilliant, but can't save the Book of Job proceedings from tilting over into the ludicrous. Read more

Mark Holcomb, Village Voice: The movie's motives might be admirable, but its execution is so bogged down in impenetrable old-white-guy self-pity that the real problems facing public education and its practitioners get buried in the wallow. Read more