Auto Focus Reviews
Top Critic
Schrader really isn't interested in Crane except as the straw man for his moral lessons about sin and sexuality and the nature of celebrity.
How do you make a movie with depth about a man who lacked any? On the evidence before us, the answer is clear: Not easily and, in the end, not well enough.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Admirably unconventional film.
It never answers the key question: Why should we care?
Kinnear is brilliant here ... and he's matched by Dafoe.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Watching this cold, detached movie, you never get the sense that Schrader cares one whit about Crane or is even curious about understanding the compulsions that wrecked his marriage and career and eventually cost him his life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It's no fun to watch, but there's no denying the power of its point of view, of its two lead performances and of its claim to attention as an evocation of recent social history.
| Original Score: 3/4
You may want to fast-forward to a movie with a point.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Although Kinnear looks the part, he's never able to capture Crane's intangible charm, a peculiar mix of leering slickness and affable class clown.
The emptiness of serial seductions has never been painted in starker colors. And the message of Auto Focus stings and sticks with you.
| Original Score: 4/5
Somewhat blurred, but Kinnear's performance is razor sharp.
| Original Score: B
Kinnear's performance is a career-defining revelation.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Michael Gerbosi's script is economically packed with telling scenes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
From the opening razzmatazz and Vegas lounge-band arrangements behind the credits, to the crime-lab murder scene itself, Mr. Schrader captures the air-conditioned look and feel of the Hollywood dream factory.
Kinnear ... gives his best screen performance with an oddly winning portrayal of one of life's ultimate losers.
| Original Score: B
A well-crafted film about the life and death of TV actor Bob Crane.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Kinnear throws himself into the role, but because he's playing a bad actor who's unaware he's acting, his skill may not always be apparent.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Schrader, I think, has found an approach that suits the skewed cultural history of his material.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A hypnotic portrait of this sad, compulsive life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
With nary a glimmer of self-knowledge, [Crane] becomes more specimen than character -- and Auto Focus remains a chilly, clinical lab report.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's a provocative, challenging study in denial and one of its star's and its director's all-time bests.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Kinnear gives an amazing performance as the Hogan's Heroes star.
| Original Score: 3/4
Does strongly benefit from its overall smartness and lucidity, and from two very canny, well-thought-out performances by Kinnear and Dafoe.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Everything in the movie rises and falls dismally, with little sense even of waste and loss.
You don't have to know anything about Bob Crane, you don't to have ever watched Hogan's Heroes, and you can still appreciate the skill behind this film.
The brave conduit of Schrader's doom-laden moralism is Greg Kinnear, giving one of those revelatory performances that makes everything an actor does prior seem like marking time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
[Kinnear's] performance has to be one of the most sympathetic acts of decency one actor has ever extended to another.
Auto Focus, Schrader's strongest movie since Affliction, is another meditation on American masculinity powerfully told with great wit and style.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
This sexaholic Lost Weekend is way too punitive -- the celebrity version of Looking For Mr. Goodbar.
A compelling motion picture that illustrates an American tragedy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Combines the least appealing aspects of the biopic (episodic narrative, lack of imagination) with the least appealing aspects of the junkie's-downward-spiral genre (wearying repetition, lofty condescension).
| Original Score: 41/100
A potent and provocative look at how the male ego is affected by sex and self-image, especially when magnified by celebrity.
| Original Score: 4/4
Gets to you like a low-grade fever, a malaise with no known antidote.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
[Crane] is played with a touching, eager-to-please obliviousness by Greg Kinnear.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
We watch a life fall apart as one could observe an organism under a microscope -- with neither passion nor compassion. It comes awfully close to an exercise in morbidity.
This true-life saga of sex, lies and videotape is one of director Paul Schrader's best films, and like Boogie Nights ranks as a shrewd expose of recent Hollywood's slimy underside.
