It's one of the best debut films in recent years.
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10/07/04
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Tarnation (2004)
92
%
Tomatometer
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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
As Caouette lays out events in storybook fashion, what pulsates through Tarnation is that life, even at its most hellish, is a thing of perilous and desperate rapture.
10/07/04
Top CriticA tale of overwhelming sadness and fierce histrionics.
10/06/04
Top CriticClick to read the article
10/06/04
The results, Cuisinarted but coherent, are an entrancing, egocentric trip into a life so unfavored by fortune its owner would be forgiven for believing in past-life crimes and karmic retribution.
10/06/04
Top CriticCaouette has taken the broken pieces of two lives and slowly, painstakingly, pasted them together -- and created one superb work of art.
10/06/04
Top CriticCertainly one of the strangest and most interesting movies of the year, and I suspect that in years to come a number of other strange and interesting movies will show traces of its influence.
10/06/04
Top CriticCaouette's triumph over his harrowing childhood and adolescence is itself a huge accomplishment -- but with Tarnation, he has used art, wit and a huge heart to forge his experiences into an unqualified masterpiece.
10/06/04
Top CriticIt's a riveting high-wire act by a young man on the verge.
10/06/04
Top CriticA bold, painful memoir located in an innovative middleground between conventional documentary and homemade home-movie collage.
10/06/04
Hey, it's not every 11-year-old boy who wants to grow up to be Ellen Burstyn.
10/06/04
An unusual documentary about a young man who has been a good steward of his childhood suffering and pain, creating out of it something that may prove to be helpful to others.
10/05/04
I didn't enjoy Tarnation, I didn't like it, I didn't particularly want to stay and watch it — but I respect it.
10/01/04
A film that defies description. I'd call it some kind of miracle.
09/30/04
Top CriticGetting so close to real-life mental illness, via footage that spans many years, renders Tarnation a uniquely potent experience.
09/29/04
Top Critic'Tarnation' does not engage the spectator. One is uncomfortable but, with no point from which to approach, no more than that.
09/23/04
feels as if it was thrown together, that an amateur was looking for ways to learn about new gadgets
09/21/04
Half self-indulgent and half excruciatingly self-aware.
09/12/04
Not only very good indeed, but something bracingly new: a home-movie phantasmagoria that's simultaneously an uncompromising autobiographical confession, saga of tragic family dysfunction, touching love story, and hypnotic avant-garde collage.
09/11/04
...it seems fairly obvious that the movie would've been far more effective had Caouette reigned in some of his over-the-top directorial choices.
09/10/04
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