Restless 2011

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: "Restless" is far more precious than profound. But that takes little away from this soulful teenage exploration of love, life and death. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: Weeping is invited, but by no means required. Read more

Glenn Kenny, MSN Movies: The generally expected continues to happen, and we're left with another coming of age tale of getting to the emotional maturity while not letting go of the quirk. Meh. Read more

A.O. Scott, New York Times: "Restless" can get under your skin, even if you are suspicious of its motives and dubious of its ideas. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: Any movie with as tender a bared heart as this one can't be dismissed. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: More care seems to have gone into wardrobe choices than into clever dialogue or plot. Read more

John Hartl, Seattle Times: This low-budget movie takes its time filling in the backgrounds of its characters. That works for a while, but when it's over you may wonder if that's all there is. Read more

Keith Phipps, AV Club: Somehow, Van Sant has made a film about life and death in which the stakes never seem higher than whether one insolent kid will stop being such a horrible mope. Read more

Richard Nilsen, Arizona Republic: Gus Van Sant doesn't make bad movies. Read more

Jake Coyle, Associated Press: The material isn't up to Van Sant's abilities, and the impression of "Restless" is of a filmmaker playing with familiar themes and searching for an adequate vessel. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: Is the title meant as a joke? A torpidly precious love story about death-obsessed adolescents, the film's becalmed and embalmed in its own sensitive self-pity. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: [A] moody, tiresomely whimsical tale. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: Restless is consciously lovely in the face of death. How rare. Read more

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: Goopy doomed teen romance looks to appeal mostly to impressionable adolescent girls. Read more

Sheri Linden, Los Angeles Times: The film errs on the side of formula even as it carries the sheen and delicacy of something handmade. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: If anyone other than Gus Van Sant had directed Restless, the film could have well been impossible to sit through. Read more

Ian Buckwalter, NPR: Van Sant gives the young lovers the sort of gauzy, dreamily sensitive treatment that he's able to deliver in his sleep by now - but too often it seems like he might be working on just such a sleep-induced autopilot. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: This overly twee, morbidly cute romance initially digs up the ageless "Harold and Maude" as a touchstone before it slips the coils of watchability. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: Unlike Van Sant's grittier, less sentimental recent small films, it's twee enough to make your teeth ache. It's the director's biggest miscalculation since "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" 18 years ago. Read more

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: In its episodic bits of quirk and whimsy, and its romantic morbidity, it's a project that smacks of film school - you can practically follow the cookie crumbs of Wes Anderson and Harold and Maude and the French New Wave. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: Van Sant salts the film with moments of macabre humor, but never goes beyond the bounds of good taste. His directorial touch is restrained. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: An uncommonly touching romance about a young man and woman who essentially worship at the shrines of their own deaths. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Van Sant and his longtime cinematographer, Harris Savides, can caress the faces of youth with a poet's eye for beauty and pain. Read more

Walter V. Addiego, San Francisco Chronicle: The film is morbid and mawkish, and packed with enough forced whimsy to make you scream. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Van Sant lays on the whimsy with a trowel; Wasikowska's quirky thrift-store wardrobe and twinkling performance are enough to trigger migraines. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: If you haven't seen a wasting disease in real life, you might think "Restless" is romantic. If you have, you might diagnose it as terminally cute. Read more

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: A film that is often as insipid as one of Nicholas Sparks's commercial melodramas. Read more

Alonso Duralde, TheWrap: The sort of gargantuan catastrophe that only a master moviemaker can create. Read more

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: All surface, no thought and quite horribly empty. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: "Twee" doesn't begin to describe this set-up, and it doesn't suit Gus Van Sant, or any director for that matter. Read more

Mark Holcomb, Village Voice: Gus Van Sant's latest -- a middle-class hetero teen romance, no less -- walks the line between mainstream sentimentality and dark art-house humor so effectively that it seems noncommittal. Read more

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: Not this era's "Love Story," despite its most ingratiating efforts to find meaning, laughter and romance by way of a too-young protagonist battling cancer. Read more