A documentary on the making and selling of Tarnation - its most fascinating selling points - could have been more cohesive and compelling than the movie itself.
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11/18/04
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Tarnation (2004)
92
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Reviews Counted:99
Fresh:91
Rotten:8
Average Rating:7.7/10
Consensus: Using music and home video footage to great effect, Jonathan Caouette has made a very personal and moving film.
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Reviews for Tarnation
A soul-baring scrapbook of a film, its audacity surpassed only by its tragedy.
03/24/05
Top CriticTarnation may not always be pretty, but it's pure, powerful stuff.
11/18/04
Top CriticTarnation leaves the viewer in a positive state of mind.
10/24/04
There's no doubting the deep love Caouette feels for his troubled mother, nor his achievement in forging such a rawly emotional film from his own traumatic experiences.
04/19/05
A masterpiece.
10/15/04
Top CriticIt's almost hypnotic, as the family members do a dysfunctional two-step with each other, and Tarnation will sweep you up with a style unlike no other documentary.
10/22/04
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10/19/04
Profoundly intimate, disturbing and compelling ride through Caouette's autobiographical, trauma-filled emotional roller coaster.
07/04/04
You shouldn’t go see “Tarnation” because it was made so cheaply. You should see it because it was made so well.
02/17/05
The film is in the May program of the Charlotte Film Society, and even the CFS has offered few pictures this compellingly strange.
05/13/05
It is a remarkable film, immediate, urgent, angry, poetic and stubbornly hopeful.
10/15/04
Top CriticAs raw and personal as a movie can be, the equivalent of a cinematic journal or diary. But it's also artfully constructed and articulated, written, edited and musically designed with often jolting brilliance.
10/14/04
Top CriticHarrowing, extremely disturbing at times, but brought to the screen in dazzling pop-art images that make the movie's grim content very much worth watching.
10/07/04
Caouette deftly overcomes all such labels with his new film Tarnation, a surprising, shocking and genuinely compassionate look at his own life.
10/15/04
A disturbing self-portrait limned from the filmmaker's relentless narcissism and his fetishization of mental illness, family dysfunction and personal suffering.
01/07/05
One of the most powerful examples of film as self-healing, 'Tarnation' astonishes both as art and as testament.
11/09/04
It transcends the recent trend of self-revelatory documentaries and becomes something rare: art.
10/21/04
Top CriticIn making beautiful peace with a difficult past, Caouette has delivered a promising vision of a future.
12/10/04
The movie climbs inside your head and rattles your consciousness.
12/10/04
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