Southland Tales 2007

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: Southland Tales is a funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: A colleague recently burbled to me that Southland Tales is "the worst movie of the year," and I could not disagree more. Yes, it's astonishingly bad, but it's far too demented to warrant that ultimate dishonor. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: You can't be both political and incoherent. Read more

Mark Rahner, Seattle Times: Consequently, I can recommend it to 'enhanced interrogation' practitioners who are tired of waterboarding. Read more

Keith Phipps, AV Club: There's more. Much more, all of it absurd and confusing. That isn't necessarily meant as a complaint. Read more

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: Even if the world Kelly's concocted always seems screamingly incoherent, you have to hand it to him. He's made a movie of our messy times that's too ambitious to settle for merely capturing the mess. It actually is the mess. Read more

Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times: As the plot becomes more convoluted and the movie goes haywire, what saves it are its sardonic details. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: We're plunked down in the middle of an apocalyptic mess. This time the mess is not so much addressed as embodied by the film itself -- but damned if it doesn't roll around in your head a while. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: Immature, crude, poorly made and a waste of time. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Southland Tales has a mood unlike anything I've seen: dread that morphs into kitsch and then back again. It's a film that tried my patience, and one I couldn't shake off. Read more

Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press: No amount of reworking could salvage what was a misbegotten and unfunny idea to begin with. Read more

Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly: Kelly seems to think that to merely mention Fallujah or global warming -- or to name a bank after Karl Rove -- is the same as actually having an opinion about them. Read more

Bruce Newman, San Jose Mercury News: By the time the movie rolls into its third hour, it's exhausted most of its comic energy, leaving you disoriented and unable to remember much of what you just saw. Read more

David Germain, Associated Press: With boundless ambition far exceeding his ability to tell a coherent story, Kelly manages only an artistic apocalypse. Read more

Jan Stuart, Newsday: Southland Tales contains stuff as uproariously out-there as anything in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and as unnervingly subversive as Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: Spending $12 and 2 1/2 hours (30 minutes less than the Cannes cut) on something as aggressively bad as Southland Tales is not something I can recommend with a clear conscience. Read more

Andrew Sarris, New York Observer: An example of a sophomore jinx encountered by radically experimental directors after their first effort proved to have more traction with audiences and critics than they had anticipated. Read more

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: Dizzyingly incoherent and subversively surreal, this sophomore effort from the man who made the great, strange Donnie Darko is certain to have its fans. I'm not going to be one of them. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: A Schwarzeneggerian actor, related to a political dynasty, has been kidnapped, replaced with a double, and -- I give up. A plot synopsis would require that the movie have a plot. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: Compared to the seemingly unsalvageable disaster Kelly screened at Cannes, this overcooked folly is a miraculous, Frankensteinian resurrection. Maybe this is grading on a curve, but I'd always rather have an excess of ambition than the opposite. Read more

Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle: The movie's failure to come together -- indeed to make sense for most of its 144 minutes, each one passing with the speed of molasses -- is a major disappointment. Read more

Melissa Anderson, Time Out: Southland Tales is one of the smartest, funniest, most audacious -- and most mournful -- films of the year. Read more

Jonathan Crocker, Time Out: By the climax, his truly ambitious, truly flawed film finally disappears into the 'time-space rift' (or whatever) to achieve some sort of cosmic transcendence. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: Writer/director Richard Kelly misses the mark with this bubbling stew of images and ideas that never quite congeals into a viable film. Read more

J. Hoberman, Village Voice: In its willful, self-involved eccentricity, Southland Tales is really something else. Kelly's movie may not be entirely coherent, but that's because there's so much it wants to say. Read more

Desson Thomson, Washington Post: Southland may be ambitious in its genre-defying abandon, sideswiping science fiction, satire, film noir and melodrama along the way, but it's also exasperatingly convoluted, self-amused and politically sophomoric. Read more