Spring Breakers (2013)

All Critics (150) | Top Critics (37) | Fresh (99) | Rotten (51)

It's campy and comic at times, but Korine also gives the film a downbeat, melancholic edge, with voiceovers, pointed repetition of dialogue and images, and hallucinatory camera work, sound and editing.

April 4, 2013 Full Review

Dave Calhoun

Time Out

Top Critic

Neon bright and all raw energy, Spring Breakers is a pulsating paradox of a movie, both a tangerine dream and a cultural reality check, a pop artifact that simultaneously exploits and explores the shallowness of pop artifacts.

March 29, 2013 Full Review

Rick Groen

Globe and Mail

Top Critic

Korine's story is a searing indictment of today's hedonistic, nihilistic youth, and his script is loaded with sharp, telling dialogue that exposes the rotten moral cores of its characters.

March 28, 2013 Full Review

Bruce Demara

Toronto Star

Top Critic

The film stands, overall, as one of the director's richer provocations ...

March 25, 2013 Full Review

Anthony Lane

New Yorker

Top Critic

Once a year, St. Petersburg is awash with thoughtless, unpleasant people making poor decisions. This spring, Korine is one of them.

March 22, 2013 Full Review

Michael O'Sullivan

Washington Post

Top Critic

An authentically cracked expression of the crazy, conflicting signals bombarding today's teenagers.

March 22, 2013 Full Review

Tom Charity

CNN.com

Top Critic

In many ways, this trashy, dazzling but enigmatic film belongs to Franco's Alien, a wannabe gangsta who just doesn't have the guts or heart to be a cold-hearted thug.

May 8, 2013 Full Review

Cara Nash

FILMINK (Australia)

The ideals of freedom, paradise and the American dream pulse in a neon coloured, bubble-gum scented descent into darkness

May 6, 2013 Full Review

Cameron Williams

The Popcorn Junkie

Parents will look on with dismay; others will leave feeling bemused but thoroughly entertained.

May 5, 2013 Full Review

Ed Gibbs

The Sun Herald

It's not exactly an exploitation film, and it's not exactly an art film, but it's also both at the same time. It's the type of experience that blows your mind but convinces you that nobody else on the planet is going to "get" it.

May 3, 2013 Full Review

Jeffrey M. Anderson

Combustible Celluloid

The message may be lost on those who only came for the bountiful breasts and booties... Spring Breakers is an immersive phantasmagoria; one of the funniest, strangest, prettiest, and flat out maddest films of the year.

April 30, 2013 Full Review

Simon Miraudo

Quickflix

Most shocking of all is that while Spring Breakers takes some time to find its bearings, this may be the most confident and artistically-grounded film of Korine's career.

April 23, 2013 Full Review

Erik Childress

eFilmCritic.com

An audacious, synth-pop mélange of ecstatic heaven and drugged-out hell -- an allegory for the corruption of innocence and the fear of blossoming female sexuality.

April 14, 2013 Full Review

Brent Simon

Shared Darkness

what you thought would happen does... and doesn't

April 14, 2013 Full Review

Bill Gibron

Film Racket

( ... ) for anyone refusing to acquiesce that this degree of 'girl power' is less a rite of passage and more like a collective suicide plunge onto a bed of six inch nails, perhaps Korine is right to be so provocative.

April 12, 2013 Full Review

Graham Young

Birmingham Mail

There's Korine, defiantly lobbing grenades at the mainstream and exploding it all to hell.

April 8, 2013 Full Review

Alistair Harkness

Scotsman

Korine would feel he'd failed badly were I to have enjoyed it.

April 8, 2013 Full Review

Philip French

Observer [UK]

A wild ride of a movie, Spring Breakers finds gleeful cinematic provocateur Harmony Korine pitching a bunch of former teen starlets into a headlong spree of sex and drugs and gangsta rap.

April 7, 2013 Full Review

Jason Best

Movie Talk

Traditionally, spring break flicks are teen angst induced romantic comedies. Brain death is the best description. Spring Breakers is a totally new way to do that brain death.

April 5, 2013 Full Review

Gary Wolcott

Tri-City Herald

Arthouse filmmaker Harmony Korine (Mister Lonely) comes dangerously close to making a mainstream movie with this blackly comical thriller.

April 5, 2013 Full Review

Rich Cline

Contactmusic.com

Maintaining his queasy dialectic throughout, the director oscillates between disgust and frenzied indulgence.

April 5, 2013 Full Review

Donald Clarke

Irish Times

You start the film wondering what the moral take on all this uninventive debauchery is going to be - is it a satire? - but then realise with dismay there is no take on offer at all.

April 5, 2013 Full Review

David Sexton

This is London

It's the kind of 'experimental' movie hailed as edgy, subversive and transgressive, when in fact it's inept, amateurish and loathsome.

April 4, 2013 Full Review

Christopher Tookey

Daily Mail [UK]

A tedious attempt to inject some style and artistic flair into the teen movie, combing outrageous behaviour with arty, slo-mo cinematography and a monotonous voiceover.

April 4, 2013 Full Review

Henry Fitzherbert

Daily Express

Drink, drugs, sex and robbery with minor violence.

April 4, 2013 Full Review

Nigel Andrews

Financial Times

The trouble is all in the film's wildly anxious structure, which feels largely dictated in the cutting-room by Korine going out of his way not to be accused of a message.

April 4, 2013 Full Review

Tim Robey

Daily Telegraph

• 1. Alien: Let's cause some trouble now.
  – Submitted by Belinda V (9 days ago)
• 1. Alien: Y'all my motha'fuckin' soul mates.
  – Submitted by Belinda V (9 days ago)
• 1. Alien: Look at all my shit!
  – Submitted by Greg M (37 days ago)
• 1. Faith: I just wanna go home. Please.
  – Submitted by Katie A (40 days ago)
• 1. Candy: I'm spring broke!
  – Submitted by Henry B (41 days ago)
• 1. Alien: Look at my shit. Look at my shit.
  – Submitted by Cara Z (41 days ago)