Restless Reviews
Top CriticAll surface, no thought and quite horribly empty.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Restless is consciously lovely in the face of death. How rare.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
This low-budget movie takes its time filling in the backgrounds of its characters. That works for a while, but when it's over you may wonder if that's all there is.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Van Sant lays on the whimsy with a trowel; Wasikowska's quirky thrift-store wardrobe and twinkling performance are enough to trigger migraines.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
If anyone other than Gus Van Sant had directed Restless, the film could have well been impossible to sit through.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
"Restless" is far more precious than profound. But that takes little away from this soulful teenage exploration of love, life and death.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A film that is often as insipid as one of Nicholas Sparks's commercial melodramas.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
"Twee" doesn't begin to describe this set-up, and it doesn't suit Gus Van Sant, or any director for that matter.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Is the title meant as a joke? A torpidly precious love story about death-obsessed adolescents, the film's becalmed and embalmed in its own sensitive self-pity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
In its episodic bits of quirk and whimsy, and its romantic morbidity, it's a project that smacks of film school - you can practically follow the cookie crumbs of Wes Anderson and Harold and Maude and the French New Wave.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Not this era's "Love Story," despite its most ingratiating efforts to find meaning, laughter and romance by way of a too-young protagonist battling cancer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
[A] moody, tiresomely whimsical tale.
The film is morbid and mawkish, and packed with enough forced whimsy to make you scream.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
An uncommonly touching romance about a young man and woman who essentially worship at the shrines of their own deaths.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Van Sant salts the film with moments of macabre humor, but never goes beyond the bounds of good taste. His directorial touch is restrained.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This overly twee, morbidly cute romance initially digs up the ageless "Harold and Maude" as a touchstone before it slips the coils of watchability.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Unlike Van Sant's grittier, less sentimental recent small films, it's twee enough to make your teeth ache. It's the director's biggest miscalculation since "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" 18 years ago.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
The film errs on the side of formula even as it carries the sheen and delicacy of something handmade.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Van Sant gives the young lovers the sort of gauzy, dreamily sensitive treatment that he's able to deliver in his sleep by now - but too often it seems like he might be working on just such a sleep-induced autopilot.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/10
More care seems to have gone into wardrobe choices than into clever dialogue or plot.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Restless" can get under your skin, even if you are suspicious of its motives and dubious of its ideas.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The sort of gargantuan catastrophe that only a master moviemaker can create.
Van Sant and his longtime cinematographer, Harris Savides, can caress the faces of youth with a poet's eye for beauty and pain.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Any movie with as tender a bared heart as this one can't be dismissed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The material isn't up to Van Sant's abilities, and the impression of "Restless" is of a filmmaker playing with familiar themes and searching for an adequate vessel.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Gus Van Sant's latest -- a middle-class hetero teen romance, no less -- walks the line between mainstream sentimentality and dark art-house humor so effectively that it seems noncommittal.
The generally expected continues to happen, and we're left with another coming of age tale of getting to the emotional maturity while not letting go of the quirk. Meh.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Goopy doomed teen romance looks to appeal mostly to impressionable adolescent girls.
