Frownland (2007)
Average Rating: 6.7/10
Reviews Counted: 18
Fresh: 15 | Rotten: 3
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 7.4/10
Critic Reviews: 9
Fresh: 9 | Rotten: 0
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 402
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Movie Info
Erstwhile New York City arthouse projectionist Ronald Bronstein makes his feature debut as a writer-director with Frownland. Dore Mann stars in the film as Keith, who clearly suffers from some type of serious social disorder. Keith has a great deal of trouble communicating. He stammers, he hems and haws, and eventually the words spew out of him in such an urgent torrent that he can't make himself understood. Keith shares a Brooklyn apartment with struggling musician Charles (Paul Grimstad, who
Cast
-
Dore Mann
Keith -
Mary Wall
Laura -
Paul Grimstad
Charles -
David Sandholm
Sandy -
Carmine Marino
Carmine -
Paul Grant
Exam Man
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All Critics (19) | Top Critics (9) | Fresh (15) | Rotten (3)
We've all known people like this, usually as little as possible, which may explain why the movie has provoked such violent reactions at festival screenings: it brings us face-to-face with the limits of our compassion.
Top CriticFrownland is like a shriek for help. It centers on an extraordinary performance that plays like an unceasing panic attack. To call it uncompromising is to wish for a better word.
Nerve-rackingly funny, director Ronald Bronstein's microbudget indie features a protagonist for whom each attempt at communication turns into a rhapsody of strangulated verbiage.
It's impossible to watch this grotty, sometimes unbearably undisciplined yet genuinely tragic movie and not think about the first films directed by John Cassavetes and Paul Morrissey.
Frownland, Ronald Bronstein's startling comedy, is like a mumblecore Eraserhead directed by John Cassavetes.
Frownland has real issues on its squirming brain.
Lynch's Eraserhead has nothing on this head-trip pic when it comes to weirdness.
Imagine a less upbeat Taxi Driver remixed mumblecore style.
Don't say that you haven't been warned.
It looks like a Cassavetes or Allen film from which malign aliens, in the course of a sinister experiment in brain-depredation, have somehow sucked out every scintilla of mojo, fun or energy.
Uncomfortable but awkwardly compelling, it's a film that mirrors the qualities of its central character - alienating and oddly appealing in equal measure.
A very nearly unbearably bleak ode to the white blind rage inspired by the mundane.
Frownland is at first revolting, then addictively fascinating, and in the end leaves you wondering whether you have discovered an entirely new cinematic universe or have simply suffered through a horribly incompetent mess.
Some have said that Taxi Driver has lost its immediacy because the city no longer carries an overtly dour impact; but Frownland finds it again.
The anomic gloom that envelops Frownland, a miserabilist, micro-budgeted 16mm freak show, fatally impedes its seeming aspirations to the mercurial grit of Cassavetes.
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