Frownland Reviews

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Lynch's Eraserhead has nothing on this head-trip pic when it comes to weirdness.

Full Review | Original Score: B+

Imagine a less upbeat Taxi Driver remixed mumblecore style.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

Uncomfortable but awkwardly compelling, it's a film that mirrors the qualities of its central character - alienating and oddly appealing in equal measure.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

A very nearly unbearably bleak ode to the white blind rage inspired by the mundane.

Full Review

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.

Full Review

Frownland 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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

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.

Full Review | Original Score: B

Frownland, Ronald Bronstein's startling comedy, is like a mumblecore Eraserhead directed by John Cassavetes.

Full Review | Original Score: A-

Frownland has real issues on its squirming brain.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/6

This is personal cinema at its most uncompromising and fierce.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

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.

Full Review

Don't say that you haven't been warned.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

The anomic gloom that envelops Frownland, a miserabilist, micro-budgeted 16mm freak show, fatally impedes its seeming aspirations to the mercurial grit of Cassavetes.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4

Full Review