Downloading Nancy (2008)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:28
Fresh:5
Rotten:23
Average Rating:3.8/10
Consensus: Unseemly, unsettling, and unremittingly bleak, Downloading Nancy is slickly made but mostly unpleasant.
Theatrical Release:Jun 5, 2009 Limited
Synopsis: When Albert Stockwell comes home from work one day he finds a note from his wife of 15 years, Nancy, saying she has gone to see friends. It is a lie. After waiting several days, Albert realizes... [More]
Starring: Maria Bello, Jason Patric, Rufus Sewell, Amy Brenneman
Director: Johan Renck
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Reviews for Downloading Nancy
| Tomatometer | Critic | Review | Category |
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 2/5 |
Tortuous, painful, confusing, contrived. It's enough to put the viewer on the couch. Full Review |
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2/4 |
Bello throws herself into Nancy admirably. Yet the film squanders her talents, and what's left of our patience, en route to a finale that is neither surprising nor illuminating: Like the rest of the movie, it's misery for misery's sake. Full Review |
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1/4 |
You can't really blame Bello for taking every chance available to let her monster talent off its chain, even when the opportunity takes the form of something so ill conceived and unworthy (and dull and ridiculous) as Downloading Nancy. Full Review |
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 8/10 |
A film that may be too heavy for its own good. Christopher Doyle fans will love it while tolerating the harshness of the story. Full Review |
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Director Johan Renck essentially builds Nancy and Albert's reality out of an aggregation of overwrought kitsch... and so what seem like occasional lapses into deadpan moments of fantasy aren't always productive in contrast. Heavily art directed for unplea Full Review |
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4.25/10 |
Boasts a raw, brave performance by Maria Bello and a stylish cinematography, but suffers from too much style over substance. Its dull, stilted screenplay has poorly developed characters and lacks any real suspense. Full Review |
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2/5 |
Maria Bello and Jason Patric in a world of pain. Full Review |
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An amazing example of talented actors doing their best to make something genuine of a complex concept but being betrayed by writers and a director who seem afraid to really let the film connect. Full Review |
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1.5/4 |
Some suspense arises about just how far the woman's sickness will take her, but it's overwhelmed by the pointlessness of the story. Full Review |
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2.5/5 |
Maria Bello’s courageous performance should find critical admiration but will not be enough for this spare and difficult drama to find much of an audience in its limited theatrical runs. Full Review |
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0.5/5 |
Downloading Nancy is a nasty exploitation flick tarted up with art-house actors and psychobabble. Full Review |
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D+ |
A chilly, bleak film about characters so programmatic that their plight is easy to shrug off. Full Review |
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1.5/5 |
creates a deadening sense of ennui not through empathy or lived-in performances, but tedium. Full Review |
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2/6 |
For all the bad behavior on display, the emotional stakes remain hazily defined. Full Review |
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C- |
What makes the movie a trial to sit through isn't just the heroine's pain-freak tastes. It's that a kinkfest with this blah an emotional spectrum is selling its own chic form of puritanism -- sex with all the life force repressed. Full Review |
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4/4 |
A tawdry tale which suggests that in the Internet Age, if you're contemplating suicide but can't quite summon up the nerve to do yourself in, you might surf S&M chat rooms to find a sadist whose fetish corresponds with your masochistic tendencies. Full Review |
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Not only does it waste the audience’s time with 102 minutes of misery and despair, but it also trashes the talents of four fine actors who should have stayed in bed reading better screenplays that deserve attention and enhance careers. Full Review |
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When you peel away this film's complex performances, at the core of its drawn-out suicide spectacle is pain so extreme, so alienating, and, in the end, so pointless. Full Review |
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More downer than downloading, in search of an online kinky rendezvous with the grim reaper. Which is apparently just a mouse click away in chatrooms these days, who knew. Adventures in self-mutilation, and sexing up assisted suicide in cyberspace. Full Review |
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Bello's performance is both naked and nuanced...An eerie, sometimes vague film in which the hidden emotions break through like sudden geysers of flame, searing all involved. Full Review |
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