Tiny Furniture Reviews
Top CriticA deft self-portrait of someone who hasn't reached the point where they can take themselves seriously.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Just when you think "Tiny Furniture" is of the nothing-happens school of indie-filmdom, something more dramatic happens.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Sharp observations, thin on entertainment value -- "Mumblecore" at its heart.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Dunham has a sharp eye for visual composition and a sharp ear, too.
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| Original Score: A-
There's not much to it, but you do sense, after watching it, that this filmmaker might someday make something very good, once she starts looking beyond her own immediate vicinity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It's one of the loveliest lowest-budget features to come down the pike.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Artful, smart, funny, sad and in its own small way dazzling.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
There's a fierce, self-lacerating wit on display in Lena Dunham's tiny indie Tiny Furniture: as big and bold as the production is modest and (literally) homemade.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Dunham definitely has a knack for shaping a comic scene, but Aura is so culturally and financially privileged that her woes begin to seem as trivial as the miniatures her mother uses in her artwork.
What Dunham lacks in polish, she makes up for in her ability to observe her generation, with the hardest truths coming at her own expense.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Many of us have been here - that first flush of post-college terror, remember? - and Dunham makes it funny and involving before entropy kicks in at the two-thirds mark.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's a find -- funny and rueful and verbally dexterous, leavening a quippy screenplay with just enough honesty to make it stick.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
If you're working with your own family in your own house and depicting passive aggression, selfishness and discontent and you produce a film this good, you can direct just about anybody in just about anything.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Dunham's dramatic comedy (comic drama?) renders the artist's life with candor, wit and 360-degree clarity. More, please.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The setup is pat, but Dunham's approach is utterly singular.
Written and directed by newcomer Lena Dunham, who also plays the lead role, this technically polished indie often feels like a semi-autographical effort by a filmmaker trying to work out issues in her art that she's still confronting in life.
This is a quirky little comedy, not a film that will change your view of reality or anything, but it's funny, wrenching and sharply observed, with a dispassion that suggests a real artist is at work.
For a DIY second feature from a very young director, Tiny Furniture feels surprisingly assured, even elegant.
The end result is that Tiny Furniture plays like situation comedy, but with an overlay of performance art.
Full Review
| Original Score: 7.5/10
The actors, mostly nonprofessionals, deliver their lines with understated charm, the pacing is just right and Jody Lee Lipes' cinematography is clear and concise.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
By playing a version of herself (and asking her family to go along for the ride), and by closing the distance between art and life, she has gotten at something real.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Tiny Furniture, winner of the SXSW festival's best narrative feature prize, gets under your skin. It's the work of a filmmaker with a stunning future.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
How Lena Dunham made her movie is more impressive or at least unique than the actual story she chooses to tell.
The funny thing? It all works reasonably well, especially if you have a yen for the urbane register of city kids and their amazingly cool parents.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
It's a tiny tale of inertia, and it's also the grand triumph of a young artist with a mature trust in her own unique voice.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
I like to encourage young wannabes for pure guts, if nothing else. But Lena Dunham makes a 98-minute home video seem like 98 days of hard labor.
Full Review
| Original Score: 0/4
Tiny Furniture is a comedy of youthful confusion that gets its kick not only for evoking a world of unromantic hookups, casual BJs, and iPhone porn, but for satirizing New York's bourgeois bohemia.
