Salinger 2013

Christy Lemire, ChristyLemire.com: It feels overstuffed and overlong, getting bogged down as it does in the minutiae of certain segments of Salinger's life without conveying a big-picture sense of what his actual writing was like. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: It's a good thing J.D. Salinger isn't around to see Shane Salerno's bio-documentary Salinger or he'd come after Salerno with a hatchet. He really would. Read more

A.O. Scott, New York Times: It is curious that a movie about such a notorious perfectionist should be so sloppy in matters of judgment and craft. Read more

John Anderson, Wall Street Journal: "Salinger" is all surface. Read more

Soren Anderson, Seattle Times: What emerges is a portrait of an enigma. Read more

Ed Bark, Uncle Barky: Salinger triumphs, though, as an absorbing portrait of a singular man of mystery. Read more

Andrew Barker, Variety: It ends up feeling like a long-winded carnival-barker pitch, even though a goodly number of genuine gems are buried within its noisy confines. Read more

Kyle Ryan, AV Club: The stories are pretty fascinating, but like all documentarians, Salerno faces the problem of what to put onscreen. Read more

Jocelyn Noveck, Associated Press: [Salerno] took a kitchen-sink approach, and while the film moves quickly for its 120 minutes, that approach blunts its impact. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: The movie epitomizes everything in the culture from which Salinger himself fled. It is, as Holden Caulfield would put it, phony. Read more

Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader: Any insights the film has to impart about the writing process are delivered in embarrassingly literal fashion. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: A good documentary can lead you to a place of not knowing what to believe about a subject. A bad documentary tells you what to believe, and why, but in ways provoking disbelief in the movie's tactics. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: By turns fascinating and infuriating. Read more

Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly: Like the book, it suffers from its creators' obsessive zeal. Only here, you can't page ahead to the next chapter. Read more

Wesley Morris, Grantland: The movie has a shallow, paparazzo literalism. It just wants to catch the legendarily reclusive Salinger getting into a Jeep. Read more

Stephen Farber, Hollywood Reporter: The cult of J.D. Salinger will be burnished by this lively but superficial doc. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: All of this is compelling. But Salerno, as if he's unsure of what he's got, goes to great lengths to heighten the drama with crisp editing, a strong score, frequent sound effects and snappy visuals. Read more

John Anderson, Newsday: Cataloging what's missing from Salerno's movie -- for instance, why "The Catcher in the Rye" worked, or didn't, and what it meant and still means to the American novel -- would run into the sports section. Read more

David Denby, New Yorker: Salinger is self-important, redundant, and interminable. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: One of those documentaries where a lot of fancy people who never met the guy use the word "must" a lot. Oh, well, he must have thought this, they say, waving their hands around. Oh, this must be why he did this. It's all kind of annoying, actually. Read more

Jordan Hoffman, New York Daily News: The result is something of a literary-style "TMZ" - certainly interesting, but a little bit sleazy - and, in terms of glimpses into the man himself, ultimately disappointing. Read more

Michael Sragow, Orange County Register: The treatment of J.D. Salinger's writing in this overwrought documentary is so inflated and pompous it comes as a relief when Judd Apatow shows up to describe The Catcher in the Rye as a funny book filled with great lines. Read more

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: Salinger is fascinating because Salinger was fascinating. But the film is frustrating, maddeningly so, because it is bent on trumpeting its own importance over that of its subject. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Make sure you bring a barf bag when you watch this doc's tacky re-enactments, hear its cheeseball score and endure literary posturings so florid they'd embarrass Baz Luhrmann of The Great Gatsby. Read more

Michael Ordona, San Francisco Chronicle: A fascinating picture of one of the 20th century's most enigmatic writers, a man who retreated from public life only to be pursued by prying fans. Read more

Dana Stevens, Slate: There's virtually no attention paid to Salinger's language, the finely wrought prose and keen ear for the American vernacular that made him stand out among midcentury writers of fiction. Read more

Kristin Tillotson, Minneapolis Star Tribune: A fluffed-up documentary that sticks it to the already famously flawed author without providing much revelation. Read more

Neal Justin, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Too bad that Salinger offers no real insight into the elusive writer and is fueled almost entirely by trivial anecdotes. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: This documentary reconstructing the life of the ultimate cult author is like a three-act thriller, and the character at the center of the story is a mute man of mystery. Read more

Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times: Where Salinger succeeds is in the gripping section on World War II, and in the exquisite, often melancholy details in the stories told by the likes of Joyce Maynard. Read more

Dave McGinn, Globe and Mail: When [Salerno] drops the stylistic overkill and lets these people talk about Salinger, what emerges is a riveting picture of a contradictory, deeply selfish, troubled man. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: Salerno's 10-year trawl through Salinger's closely guarded life gets repetitive, since there are no known film interviews or audiotapes of the author to draw on. Read more

Alonso Duralde, TheWrap: This documentary is, perhaps, a lengthy advertisement for those upcoming books as well as the new biography, but it certainly stands on its own as a revealing glimpse at the genius and the misanthropy of a legendary man of letters. Read more

David Fear, Time Out: You wonder why Salerno thought the man who created Holden Caulfield would be best served by an abundance of sentimentalism, a stock sap-tastic score and some genuinely cheesy dramatizations on a black stage (the director is no Hollywood phony, but still). Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: Insightful gems are unearthed throughout the flawed but engrossing Salinger, a much-anticipated documentary about the author of The Catcher in the Rye. Read more

Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice: What the movie gets hilariously, howlingly wrong is the idea that a life like Salinger's-so extraordinary, yet so willfully humdrum-could somehow be captured by the most shopworn of cinematic techniques. Read more

Stephanie Merry, Washington Post: Given the many stories about Salinger and the dearth of images, it would have been more efficient just to skip the documentary altogether. Read more