Laurel Canyon Reviews
Top Critic
Comes across pretty much as a pretentious soap opera -- a movie that wants the audience to believe it has more to say about life than the usual melodrama.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Arizona Daily Star
It's a half-step backward for Cholodenko, whose latest film has none of the tenderness or fresh insight about relationships and sexual ambiguity of High Art.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Combustible Celluloid
it goes without saying that McDormand is the high point of Laurel Canyon. She tears through the stiff, paper-thin movie with a sense of complete freedom, the same way Geena Davis did in The Accidental Tourist.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
A clumsy package of clichés.
| Original Score: 1/4
The spectacle of pretty people floating languidly across the screen notwithstanding, Laurel Canyon is short on conviction and long on contrivance.
The characters are tedious, as are the fussy performances of Bale and Beckinsale.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
[A] tame exercise in hedonism and self-discovery.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Self-discovery seems to be the goal, but the revelations hardly seem worth the work.
| Original Score: 3/5
Oregon Herald
Despite a great ensemble of actors, it will leave you hanging from a cliff.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Flipside Movie Emporium
With vocal inflections and a caring glance, McDormand rescues the mother-son dynamic that twists through Canyon like the famed Mulholland Drive.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Las Vegas CityLife
'We're left with a film that doesn't create enough interest in what went on in those Laurel Canyon backyards to justify pulling over and watching.'
Teletext
No matter how many times she pushes her specs up her nose Beckinsale is never going to be believable as a nerd. Bale as a psychiatrist: it's easier to envisage him as Batman.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Slant Magazine
If the booze-swilling, oversexed evil sister of McDormand's Almost Famous matron were to make her own movie, it might look something like Laurel Canyon.
Citysearch
The chemistry between McDormand, Ian and goody-two-shoes Alex is soggy rather than sexy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
L.A. Weekly
Relies on easy caricature over true character such that the film fails to build emotional momentum or resonance.
Reno Gazette-Journal
By the time Laurel Canyon closes, we're left with a number of dangling subplots, lots of questions and two hideously unbelievable reconciliations.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Sun Publications (Chicago, IL)
...a strikingly judgmental movie in favor of liberal lifestyles.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
New Times
Maybe it's that Cholodenko's more familiar with New York and loath to be too critical of another town, but Laurel Canyon lacks the sense of risk that High Art had, and in doing so, emasculates its apparent protagonist in Sam.
