The Paperboy Reviews
"The Paperboy" is one of those rare examples where you might wish the movie was less faithful to the book.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The Paperboy is southern Gothic wallowing in the swamp of low camp. And if the wallowing were deliberate, this might have been hugely funny.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The Paperboy bears some promise as a good-bad movie, but it unfolds as a bad-bad one.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
It's a movie that seems to have a mild form of heatstroke: it's blurry, as if filmed long ago, and feverish, and the story wanders all over the place as if lost in a bayou. When it's over, you want to wipe your brow.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The Paperboy is over-the-top every which way you look.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This one has it all: sex, violence, torture, incest, jellyfish attacks, telekinetic masturbation, Nicole Kidman peeing on Zac Efron and a gator gutted in revolting close-up.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
This is just the sort of movie certain people are hoping to see when they go to the movies but would never say they go to the movies for.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"The Paperboy" suggests something Tennessee Williams might have come up with, if he didn't know how to string together a plot.
Full Review
| Original Score: 0.5/4
It's a good story about people who are not what they seem, about identity wavering in the heat-a true swamp tale-but the movie is messily ineffective.
The entire cast of "The Paperboy" glistens with a golden sheen, as if they've been sprayed with Pam cooking oil.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
'The Paperboy" can't decide whether to be an unfunny sex comedy, a half-hearted detective story or a woeful race drama - so it decides to be all three ...
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Los Angeles Times
Top CriticThere is so much grit in Kidman and McConaughey's performances, it's a lot for Efron to stand up to, but he does a good job of giving Jack a cocky innocence that is disarming.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Daniels' deft adaptation of Pete Dexter's 1996 novel is even more disturbing on screen than on the page. It's a Southern Gothic noir thriller with a terrific ensemble cast.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Some of The Paperboy's missteps would be forgivable if Daniels delivered them with any conviction, but he doesn't seem capable of it.
Ludicrously obsessed with sex to often laughable extremes, it's the rare film that can be described as "horny."
This hot mess got booed by the snobs at Cannes, but there's no denying its profane energy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
There is so much sweaty, gum-smackin', Southern-accented *acting* going on, you'd applaud if you weren't appalled.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
The movie curls back and forth as sinuously as a snake through the bayou, tracing the fine line between desire and degradation.
Most of the acting in "The Paperboy" is actually pretty restrained, which helps you adjust to all the alligator guts, swamp water and naked flesh.
I'll give this to The Paperboy: It's never boring.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
It's errant camp, which has the effect of undermining our involvement in the mystery.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It is by turns lurid, humid, florid, languid and stupid, but it is pretty much all id all the time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
"The Paperboy" is great trash, and as Pauline Kael told us, the movies are so seldom great art that if we can't appreciate great trash, we might as well not go at all.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The movie as a whole is a rather grim, dismal experience where the elements never quite gel.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The Paperboy doesn't hold together as a sensible piece of work. But as an insensible piece of work, it's pretty jaw-dropping.
You start squirming early and end up feeling you desperately need a bath.
Full Review
| Original Score: 0/4
Sometimes hot messiness has its charms.
Lurid, touching, and not quite like anything I've ever seen.
All the actors rise or bend to the challenge, giving juicy performances and seemingly having a fine old time.
'The Paperboy' just feels inept - with the odd, fun moment of bite-your-tongue high camp emerging from the chaos.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
This is a tale of murder, idealistic journalism, warped sexual desires, a slipshod legal system and inbred backwater types hostile to outsiders.
