Detachment Reviews
Top Critic
The film is guilty of reverse sentimentality, where the relentless unhappiness comes to seem as manufactured and artificial as the schmaltz in a romcom.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Detachment gets an A for enthusiasm but a C for execution.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
There's something weirdly effective about the artistic desperation, which includes inserts of chalkboard animation and to-the-camera testimonials.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Everywhere you turn in Detachment, someone is trying to make you feel like hell.
It wants to be an expose of the pervasive horrors of modern life. Instead, it just forces us to detach as well.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Detachment" quickly gets stuck in its own world-weariness.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Even at its most ludicrous - when it is shouting into your ear - its sheer audacity grabs your attention.
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| Original Score: 3/5
[Brody] is undermined by a bloated script (from Carl Lund, a former public-school teacher) that lumbers him with bloviating asides about how we have failed our children.
It's nice to see righteous anger in a movie. If only the education drama "Detachment" knew what to do with it.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Brody, as the semi-fallen idealist, has a haggard eloquence, and Tim Blake Nelson, Christina Hendricks, and James Caan, as his colleagues, act out a bitterly funny spectrum of desolation.
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| Original Score: B
The movie is one big scream, clichéd and hardly credible as an oblique call to civility.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Adrien Brody, one of the weirdest looking actors of the millennium, plays Henry Barthes, a man so emotionally blocked by a lifetime of disillusion that he cannot connect with any other human being.
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| Original Score: 1/4
The movie's motives might be admirable, but its execution is so bogged down in impenetrable old-white-guy self-pity that the real problems facing public education and its practitioners get buried in the wallow.
The movie works, and, though it cries out against so much, you sense that the one thing it does not cry is wolf.
Brody is brilliant, but can't save the Book of Job proceedings from tilting over into the ludicrous.
Despite many nameable flaws, [it] is a wrenching and powerful achievement...
Harrowing depiction of the American educational system features a superb performance by Adrien Brody.
