The Bling Ring Reviews
Top CriticThe sense of detachment that is a signature of Sofia Coppola's work -- the coolly distant, stylishly dreamlike way she regards her characters -- works to her detriment in The Bling Ring.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This is a funny, sarky, bang-on portrayal of the freakiness of celeb obsession. The story would sound outrageous - if it wasn't true.
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| Original Score: 4/5
All the characters are shallow and one-dimensional and, while one can argue that this is the point, it doesn't make for 90 minutes of engaging cinema.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Daring to face these often noxious, seemingly empty phenomena on aesthetic terms, and taking on a degree of their flatness and simplicity, Coppola renders them surprisingly substantial.
Coppola neither makes a case for her characters nor places them inside of some kind of moral or critical framework; they simply pass through the frame, listing off name brands and staring at their phones.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
s Coppola offering a critique (a stated hope) or somehow being complicit? These questions seem to coil in on themselves, making The Bling Ring that weird yet common hybrid of tsk-tsking and celebration.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It has nothing to say about kids who had nothing better to do than to thieve from the rich and famous.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This is consumerism run riot without a moral compass, not the redistribution of wealth, but its pure celebration.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A modern-day cautionary tale about youth run amok that, for all its ripped-from-the-headlines topicality, still exudes a dreamy, otherworldly perfume.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's fun while it lasts, but ultimately forgettable, kind of like the people they stole from.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Is this anthropology, or simply entropy? It's partly the former and lots of the latter, with precious little insight.
Ultimately, though the pace is snappy, the film feels a little empty; these teens seem too soulless even for satire.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
A comedy, of sorts, if what it says about our obsession with the famous and the frivolous weren't so totally depressing.
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| Original Score: 3/4
What does Coppola want us to think about these beautiful young idiots? What does she think? She's too cool or too wary or too close to her subject to engage.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
If you feel outraged and a little sick watching the people in The Bling Ring, it's because Coppola wants you to feel that way. You're not reacting against the movie, but with it.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A little cheekier than most Coppola films, its subjects fish in a barrel of barbed laughs.
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| Original Score: B
The stars hide; the ardent admirers seek. With a breezily nonjudgmental air, "The Bling Ring" fictionalizes this story of five seekers.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The kids' story was irresistible to the media, permitting both sensationalism and easy zeitgeist commentary, and that's about as far as writer-director Sofia Coppola takes it in this big-screen dramatization.
For all its beautifully established mood, this film remained, at least for me, curiously unsatisfying-a kind of exquisitely tasteful after-school special.
The young actors, including Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, and a very un-Harry Potter-ish Emma Watson, are engagingly blank, and Coppola films their exploits with a smooth and slowly accumulating creepiness.
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| Original Score: B-
She neither explains nor excuses nor extols nor excoriates these kids, which would be fine, but she doesn't really examine them either.
The film's best moments demonstrate just how skilled [Coppola's] become at conveying material longing, even when such yearnings have reached the realm of the perverse.
Where exactly is the drama here? Why tell this story at all?
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| Original Score: 2/4
'The Bling Ring' occupies a vertiginous middle ground between banality and transcendence, and its refusal to commit to one or the other is both a mark of integrity and a source of frustration.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The Bling Ring is the cinematic equivalent of the vapid, superficial kids it features - all visual panache and minimal substance.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Make no mistake, it is lovely to look at this celebrity bedazzled bit of L.A. crime history for a while. But the movie ultimately leaves you feeling as empty as the lives it means to portray.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Though on the surface "The Bling Ring" is slight of aim and repetitive of structure, it is actually a slam-dunk conservative critique of American culture ...
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It could have been one of those ripped-from-the-headlines quickies you see on subpar cable. Instead, The Bling Ring plugs into the zeitgeist of trash culture and sparks like a live wire.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It would rather mock its protagonists than help us understand them.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Narratively static and morally banal. That may be par for the course, however, when half the movie is spent watching shallow kids try on other people's clothes.
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| Original Score: 2/5
It's obvious that Coppola knows this milieu, what these kids wear and the way they speak.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A rich (and even urgent) portrait of a society that has lost control of its culture, a place where aspirations have become the ultimate impediment to actual happiness.
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| Original Score: 8.6/10
The Bling Ring is enjoyable. And it's always easy on the eyes.
Eschewing the languorous rhythms and visual lyricism of her previous work, Coppola has crafted a fast-paced caper about vapid youth obsessed with wealth and notoriety.
An off-putting, based-on-actual-events ode to the rich and clueless.
A cool and intriguing cinematic journey, largely free of either editorial commentary or amateur psychology.
Doesn't explore the who's and why's of the scenario so much as the how's and why-not's.
The Bling Ring is the first of [Coppola's] pictures that I actively dislike -- I sense no mystery, no depth there.
Though the material is sensational, the film is on the blah side.
Watching The Bling Ring, the audience is invited to understand the impulses of these child-woman thieves, even as Coppola stands firmly apart from their craziness and sees them for who they are.
Always adept at directing young performers, Coppola encourages fine work here from her cast of mostly newcomers, with Watson taking special relish in shedding her goody-two-shoes "Harry Potter" persona.
Perhaps even more here than in her other films, Coppola's attitude toward her subject seems equivocal, uncertain; there is perhaps a smidgen of social commentary, but she seems far too at home in the world she depicts to offer a rewarding critique of it.
