The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things 2004

Jessica Reaves, Chicago Tribune: At best, this film raises an all-too-relevant question: Are true-life stories interesting because they're true? Or because they're interesting? At worst, it raises a different question: What if they're neither true nor interesting? Read more

Jeff Shannon, Seattle Times: Argento's film is arguably exploitative, but its real-life horrors are effectively authentic. Read more

Tamara Straus, San Francisco Chronicle: Now the fabricated story of a boyhood that included abandonment, rape and near constant fear and humiliation is a movie. The result is unwatchable. Read more

Noel Murray, AV Club: The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things has a daring that's hard to dismiss, even when it only amounts to Argento shamelessly getting off on human rot. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: Vile beyond redemption. Read more

Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times: It's a taxing bit of exploitation, which, although you're glad to know it's a work of fiction, doesn't exactly make a case for itself as art. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Argento's entire performance is an act of exhibitionism, and so is the movie, which would have done well to drop that cynical and verbose title and substitute something catchier. Read more

Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly: A degraded and degrading film, of interest only because it's symptomatic of so much that's wrong with the drearily repetitive tabloid mentality that has infected not just the news media, but the whole culture industry. Read more

Jan Stuart, Newsday: This film's heart is not deceitful, merely obvious and overbearing. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: Stripped of all its lurid backstory, the fictional tale is revealed onscreen to be a mere catalog of horrors, an ugly grafting together of Dickens and America's Most Wanted. Read more

Jack Mathews, New York Daily News: This is an execrable movie. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: There is no redemption, no surcease, and as the film ends the barbarity continues. This film made me intensely uncomfortable, but that was its intention. Read more

David Rooney, Variety: The emotionless, overwrought movie's lack of psychological depth or dramatic verisimilitude makes the boy's grim odyssey a curiously remote and unshocking horror show. Read more

Rob Nelson, Village Voice: If Deceitful is authentic at all, it's in revealing Asia Argento as the mirror opposite of JT LeRoy. One of these characters is a real artist -- or at least a true believer in the cathartic power of autobiography. Read more

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: Reeks of a project desperate for edgy credibility. Read more