Reality Bites Reviews
Top CriticHowever conventional Reality Bites resolves to be, it is always engaging. Best of all, Ryder has her greatest role since Heathers, once again proving herself a seriously funny young actress.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's a good example of an anti-establishment comedy crippled by a seeming desire to infatuate the establishment itself. What Reality Bites needs most is a good bite. From reality.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Among the movie's strengths are the performances, especially that of Ryder, who comes across as bright, beautiful and more delicate than ever before.
When the movie is over, you don't feel as if you had shared the experience of a new generation; you feel puzzled and vaguely crummy, as if you had just read a solemn news-magazine cover story about it.
Yearning, hilarious, lost within their precocious self-awareness, these slackers have soul.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Although it never became the definitive document of Generation X, Reality Bites is a touchstone for anyone just out of college and stuck with more ideals than job prospects, not to mention a head full of bad-TV trivia.
| Original Score: 3/4
In 1994, the novelty of seeing a romantic comedy written and directed by, as well as starring, people in their early 20s made for a certain freshness, but after a point this 'youthfulness' consists of little more than TV references.
Reality Bites begins as a promising and eccentric tale of contemporary youth but evolves into a banal love story as predictable as any lush Hollywood affair.
There's probably a moderate little romantic comedy crying to get out here, but the film's vain striving for casual hip proves suffocatingly obtrusive.
Like the generation it presents so appealingly, it doesn't see any point in getting all bent out of shape and overambitious. But it knows how to hang out and have a great time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
What unwritten law prevented the makers of Reality Bites from observing that their heroine can't shoot video worth a damn, that their hero is a jerk, and that their villain is the most interesting person in the movie?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The story may not be new, but it is as fresh as the film's new faces.
Beneath a thin veneer of style lie buried all the old cliches and formulas of typical romantic comedies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
[Childress and Stiller] encapsulate an era.
