Tim Water

The occasional spikes of laugh outloud humour aren't enough to save this sprawling, self-indulgent and frankly directionless mess. Clutching a bag of prescription drugs; running the gauntlet through the menacing neighbourhood, to the dangerously run down apartment complex with creaking lift. It opened with one giant tip of it's loose-fitting hat in the direction of Joker - which is where the comparison between the two films ends. Joaquim evolved as Joker, a fantastically tight film in which his character grows from a drooped, wheezing, trodden-down weed between the cracks on a filthy sidewalk, and finds a way to bloom - a dazzling bright, twisted foul blooming, full of noxious nectar. Here, Joachim's Beau simply twists and wheezes. There's plenty of other movies that get referenced here - it finishes on Truman Show's lake - at least that's when I finished with it and walked out. It's the kind of pretentious script you'd expect the average too cool 22yr old film graduate to knock out; except no one in their right mind would usually fund such folly. And the world Aster drops us into lacks the immerssive depth of his previous work. However good Hereditary and Midsommer were, Aster won't get away with making many more of these tedious pieces of tripe; nor, one suspects, will A24 be willing to throw such big budgets at his films in future if this is the direction he's taking. They'll be well aware they were lucky to recover as much as they did from this...

Good premise, capable directing but clearly needed a competent script editor to comb out the tangles before going into production. In fact 'tangles' is being kind, there's a baffling dinner scene which fails to deliver any of the tension it was apparently aiming for, and there are some elemental mis-steps with the show don't tell rules being abandoned. Astonishing that these things weren't seen to before embarking on a five million pound shoot. Great opportunity missed...

Wow, what a spectacularly bad film.

Poor plotline, poor script, horribly hammy acting...as bad as ive seen Spacey and the worst of Winslet. I don't think Parker was ever given the money to make another film after this debacle. The critics and studios called this one right...woeful effort.

What a steaming pile of garbage. Stumbles through a series of jaw-dropping plot holes... Daughter: "I can't eat the peanut butter sandwich." Father: "Why not?" Daughter: "Because I'm allergic to peanuts." Father: "Since When?" Daughter: "Since birth." The only revelation here is the extraordinary news that Tom Cruise's 10 year old daughter hadn't died of anaphylactic shock 10 times over before filming began. Spielberg has crafted some of the finest movies ever made...this is absolutely not one of them. Drivel.