Don Jon Reviews
Top CriticJoseph Gordon-Levitt turns the gym-tan-laundry routine into an art form with Don Jon, his vibrant and viciously profane directorial debut.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The movie becomes increasingly soft-edged and sappy.
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| Original Score: C+
At least 80% of it is snappy, droll fluff, while the other 20% is what you get when you persuade Julianne Moore to be in your movie: in a word, better.
Gordon-Levitt's characters feel real and "Don Jon" is a convincing, authentic, funny, modern romance.
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| Original Score: B
Really, "Don Jon" could have - should have - gone on another 20 minutes. Then again, when was the last time you felt that about a romantic comedy? Or any movie?
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| Original Score: 3/4
The movie has a keen understanding of how easily we can hurt other people by not considering them.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Who would have thought one of the most amusing and oddly insightful romantic comedies would be built around the power and the potent pull of porn?
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| Original Score: 4/5
Gordon-Levitt keeps things riotous for the film's first hour, and if he eases into an ending that's a little Hollywood-standard, after having so much fun tweaking form and content, I'm guessing audiences will cut him some slack.
[A] deceptively sincere movie about masculinity and its discontents that Mr. Gordon-Levitt, making a fine feature directing debut, shapes into a story about a young man's moral education.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
By the time Jon learns that "you have to lose yourself in another person" (a nice turn of phrase), it's too late for us to lose ourselves in the movie. "Don Jon" is already gone.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Writer/director/star Joseph Gordon-Levitt takes an intriguing subject - human attraction - and nimbly probes it with wit, insight and a disarming forthrightness.
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| Original Score: 3/4
R-rating aside, it should be required viewing for every 15-year-old boy on the planet.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Rarely has a film offered such raw and honest talk -- with visuals, too -- about male sexuality.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The film manages to be extremely efficient, conveying its points, making the audience laugh, getting viewers invested and even breaking our hearts in just 90 minutes.
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| Original Score: 3/4
An overheated disquisition on the pleasures and limitations of masturbation.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt's writing/directing/starring debut is like its diamond-in-the-rough title character. It shows a lot of unrealized potential, with enough charm to ease you past its shortcomings.
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| Original Score: 3/4
"Don Jon" deserves praise for wearing its message lightly and yet for daring to present such a lecture in today's Internet-drenched environment.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Writer-director-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt is so savvy about the workings of our small minds that he knows just how to reel us in (sex) before schooling us on the important things in life (love).
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| Original Score: 4/5
[Gordon-Levitt's] skills as an actor, and those of co-stars Scarlett Johansson and Julianne Moore, keep us watching, even as public-place modesty makes us want to look away.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
One of the most adventurous actors of his generation, Gordon-Levitt has a good sense of just how graphically he can depict Jon's addiction and maintain the sympathy of both men and women.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Not exactly an original idea. But Gordon-Levitt goes at it with gusto, and style. Give the guy some props.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Versatile actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt turns to writing and directing with this smart, sexy, sweet, and hilarious comedy about the difficulties of forging and sustaining relationships.
A sharp turn on the romantic comedy, a movie about flawed people doing flawed things, often in funny fashion.
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| Original Score: 4/5
It's a dark comedy about matters of the heart, and how far some people go to take their minds off such matters.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Gordon-Levitt demonstrates he is a filmmaker with promise who blends a good ear for dialogue with fine pacing and an eye for making a good-looking picture.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Don Jon [is] a bruisingly funny, bracingly smart comic dare that marks a stellar feature directing and writing debut for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Jon with humor, heat and sneaky heart.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Don Jon is visually interesting without being overbearing. The script finds a witty way to confront serious issues. And Levitt-Gordon takes on the personality of a guy straight out of Jersey Shore.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Gordon-Levitt proves a natural filmmaker, nimbly staging Jon's highly amusing Catholic confessions, along with porn montages that mimic the dopamine-charged editing of Requiem for a Dream.
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| Original Score: B+
This is a sweet, lively and funny movie rather than a fully realized one, but it makes clear that Gordon-Levitt has a natural feeling for cinema and should do more of it.
''Don Jon'' is a lark, but an enjoyable one with a full-hearted finale, and it further reveals the considerable talents of Gordon-Levitt.
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| Original Score: 3/4
[Gordon-Levitt] can act, and there's a possibility he can also direct, but there's no evidence in Don Jon that he can do both at the same time.
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| Original Score: 2/4
"Don Jon" is hardly as slick as its main character fancies himself, and that's OK. After all, as Gordon-Levitt's movie takes great pains to illustrate, what we constitute as perfection often proves to be a deceptive illusion.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Merely ends up trading one beefcake delusion for another.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Even when his story starts getting serious, Gordon-Levitt always keeps it funny, and his cast is in on the joke.
The self-assured helmer shows genuine affection for his characters, balancing their openly satiric qualities with a disarmingly sincere human center.
Crude, repetitive and rigorously single-minded, the popular actor's writing and directing debut lays it all on a bit thick, as the few points the film has to make are underscored time and time again.
The movie takes a roundhouse punch at male shallowness, but Jon, in and out of his clothes, is not an interesting enough man to be emblematic of anything.
The movie is a broad ethnic comedy, but there's nothing broad about the wicked-smart way it's executed. Even long-played-out stereotypes take on new life.
For his first time behind the camera, Gordon-Levitt is already showing signs of great promise. It's a stereotype that actors-turned-filmmakers focus solely on performances, and while Don Jon is certainly a well-acted movie, it's also a good-looking one.
Often light on its feet, bolstered by the reliable charms and writing chops of its leading man.
