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08/09/02
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Big Bad Love (2002)
35
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:20
Fresh:7
Rotten:13
Average Rating:5.3/10
Consensus: A boozy depiction of a struggling writer, Big Bad Love is too messy and self-indulgent.
Theatrical Release:Feb 22, 2002 Limited
Synopsis: BIG BAD LOVE brings to life the characters that populate Mississippi writer Larry Brown's short story collection of the same name. Leon Barlow (Arliss Howard) is a writer with a compulsion to drink... [More]
Starring: Arliss Howard, Debra Winger, Rosanna Arquette, Paul Le Mat
Director: Arliss Howard
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Reviews for Big Bad Love
1 - 20 (sorted by date)
Top CriticThough you couldn't call Love a complete success, it's packed with talent and intelligence, wayward poetry and bluesy longing.
07/20/02
Top CriticA movie that can't get sufficient distance from Leroy's delusions to escape their maudlin influence.
06/21/02
Top CriticThe movie is obviously a labour of love so Howard appears to have had free rein to be as pretentious as he wanted.
06/21/02
Top CriticA rough, uneven but admirably imaginative film.
05/03/02
Top CriticWhile Howard's appreciation of Brown and his writing is clearly well-meaning and sincere, the movie would be impossible to sit through were it not for the supporting cast.
04/26/02
Top CriticAdmirably ambitious but self-indulgent.
03/29/02
Top Critic[Howard] so good as Leon Barlow ... that he hardly seems to be acting.
03/29/02
Top CriticBrims with passion: for words, for its eccentric, accident-prone characters, and for the crazy things that keep people going in this crazy life.
03/28/02
Top CriticIt all comes down to whether you can tolerate Leon Barlow. I can't.
03/15/02
Top CriticUnfortunately, Big Bad Love, for all its undeniably good anti-mainstream intentions, fails to come off even as the cutting-edge manifestation it tries so strenuously to be.
03/13/02
Top CriticBrave and admirable for the trust that it puts in a viewer's intuition and willingness in going along with it right through to its rewarding finish.
03/08/02
Top CriticThe only cosmic question that arises from watching this film is, why should we care about any of these people?
03/03/02
Top CriticThere are labors of love and there are labors of labor, exhaustively worked-through movies in which you feel as if you are watching a director give birth to every idea that has been gestating in the brain since he was given his first 8-mm camera.
02/23/02
Top Critic[F]rom the performances and the cinematography to the outstanding soundtrack and unconventional narrative, the film is blazingly alive and admirable on many levels.
02/23/02
Top Critic... alternately charming and annoying.
02/22/02
Top Criticthere's enough meat on the bones of Big Bad Love ... to keep it from being dismissable.
02/22/02
Top CriticThough Howard demonstrates a great eye as a director, this Southern Gothic drama is sadly a tough sit, with an undeveloped narrative and enough flashbacks and heavy-handed metaphors to choke a horse -- or at least slow him down to a canter.
02/22/02
Top CriticIn the end, this is a story about a hard-to-know guy who loves his typewriter most of all. Everything else is just dust-jacket photography.
02/21/02
Top CriticBrown's saga, like many before his, makes for snappy prose but a stumblebum of a movie.
02/19/02
Top Critic1 - 20 (sorted by date)
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