Holy Rollers Reviews
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
Offering the viewer hardly any reason to feel this story is credible.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Observer [UK]
It's a surprisingly cool little film, not funny at all but rather seriously torn between the secular and the sacred, a conflict Eisenberg expresses with a neurotic intensity.
This is London
We expect more than we eventually get, even if what we get is watchable throughout.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Guardian [UK]
[A] breathless, enjoyable comedy-thriller based on the true story of how Hassidic Jews were recruited as mules in the late 1990s to smuggle ecstasy pills from Amsterdam into New York.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Daily Telegraph
Jesse Eisenberg, in the main role, enhances the film again and again with his comic timing and ability to nail the part of a sheltered ingénu with an incipient rebel streak. It might be dodgy merchandise, but he sells it all the same.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Little White Lies
This is more accurately a film about a revolution against innocence and the vacuum it leaves behind.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Film4
Kevin Asch's morality drama restages the Fall of Man as a modern, real-life crime story. It is understated, but compelling, with yet another standout performance from Jesse Eisenberg.
Empire Magazine
Jewish clichés can be forgiven as Asch revisits the shtetl for his crime tale that shines a light upon a society within via one rebel's secular awakening.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Las Vegas CityLife
Peters out at the end. ... Still, there are more than enough positive elements, especially Ben Kutchins' expressive and mesmerizing cinematography, to recommend it.
Flick Filosopher
t's a familiar story -- Nice Kid gets mixed up in Bad Things -- but as first-time feature director Kevin Asch tells it, there's extra potency to the contrast between the Nice and the Bad.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Holy Rollers - the title strikes me as unfortunately glib and tone deaf - is basically two movies in one: a genuinely involving character drama and a by-the-numbers crime story/ cautionary tale.
Full Review
| Original Score: 86/100
Las Vegas Weekly
They don't reinvent the gangster genre, but the spin they put on it is intriguing enough to make it seem fresh.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Top CriticIt's sadder and scarier than its predecessors, but it also may be the most important chapter in the tale.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
[It's] so pretentiously blurred and weirdly framed I've seen better-looking surveillance tapes in documentaries. There's also a tedious romance. But the moral dilemma at the heart of Holy Rollers is so compelling I'd recommend it anyway.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The film is slight, but Eisenberg is a deadpan delight.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The tense dynamic between these two fine actors, not to mention Asch's confident feel for New York City circa the late-1990s, keeps this slightly undercooked but wholly engrossing melodrama on course.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
I think [Eisenberg is] a much more astute and detailed actor then some people give him credit for.
Eisenberg showed this character's dilemma in, I thought, a really smart way.
