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Top Critics (34)
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DVD (31)
Until now Bale's screen persona has been defined by a graceful athleticism; here his physicality is repellent, yet he carries the occasionally creaky plot of Scott Kosar's unsettling screenplay to a resonant finish.
[Bale's] is a great performance, full of commitment and sacrifice, and The Machinist is one of the year's best films.
It begins dark and depressing, but ends up merely dull.
It is well worth enduring for the performance of Bale.
Though Bale deserves all the credit that can be heaped at his feet ... there is far more to this sinister psychological thriller than just exhibiting Bale's emaciated form.
It would be easy to accuse Bale of a warped kind of egomania if his performance wasn't so mesmerizing.
If Nine Inch Nails, Swans and Ministry ever loomed large in the landscape of your imagination, Anderson's gloomy aesthetic may exert a sour but lingering pull.
A brilliant, harrowing performance by Bale.
It's not necessarily a fun or loveable picture, but it is interesting and entertaining.
With time as a buffer, it's now easier to see The Machinist for what it is: a labyrinthine leap down the rabbit hole into a nightmarish wonderland.
It's fulfilling to watch a psychological thriller that demands the audience watch, pay attention, follow along, and decipher for themselves without falling in to the usual Hollywood conventions.
Here, shorn of every ounce of body fat, Bale is laid open like an autopsy specimen, and he easily gives his best performance.
Bale is superb as Trevor, able to not only convey the wasted person within, but to avoid making his physical appearance the only thing we care about or notice.
Um angustiante pesadelo que, trazendo Bale numa performance corajosa e repleta de auto-sacrifício, funciona como um estudo poético sobre os extremos da culpa.
It's a somber, sometimes slow-slithering dark piece that's heavier on style than substance, but it all works.
An intelligent, well-crafted picture.
A few scenes into the gloom and you'll have a good idea what is generally up, if not the specifics, making the journey toward the eventual, inevitable twist fairly one-dimensional.
One can't deny the dubious appeal of the spectacle of the skin-and-bone Bale, quite possibly endangering his health for the sake of his art.
An absorbing and eerie study of paranoia and psychological torment.
Kosar has ... constructed an exercise in existentialism that is so literal it's a true feat that he was able to reign it all back in for the somewhat tidy ending of this film.
One of the best DVDs that came out in 2005...
It's like a film the Coen Brothers would have made, back when they still made good movies.
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