Auto Focus

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The film is pitch-perfect in its decor, music, clothes, cars, language and values. It takes place during those heady years between the introduction of the Pill and the specter of AIDS, when men shaped as adolescents by Playboy in the 1950s now found some of their fantasies within reach.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Michael Gerbosi's script might have reduced Crane to a clueless cliche were it not for the bruised humanity that Greg Kinnear brings to the role. Kinnear is dynamite.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

In this admirably unconventional film, director Paul Schrader is interested in just about everything BUT traditional biopic business.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

In Auto Focus, the strangely wonderful and weirdly touching new film from Paul Schrader, the comedy and the tragedy keep getting mixed up.

Austin Chronicle Steve Davis

The set and art direction are superb, evoking Sixties and Seventies décor with a dazzling precision.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Schrader's strongest movie since "Affliction," is another meditation on American masculinity powerfully told with great wit and style.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

This movie is for select tastes. It's not the fusillade of porn that wears you down, but the melancholy of watching an unremarkable man glide down the tubes as if on a water slide.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The performances are vividly alive.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Certainly the movie is one of Schrader's most accomplished, and most entertaining, but there's something cold and unforgiving about his vision, delivered with a severity that only a bred-in-the-bone Calvinist could muster.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Kinnear's performance has to be one of the most sympathetic acts of decency one actor has ever extended to another. Crane always wanted to be a real, respectable movie actor. Channeled through Kinnear, he finally gets his wish.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Is Auto Focus a cautionary tale or just a morbid, voyeuristic foray into kitsch and kink? Whatever it is, it's not pretty - it's the cinematic equivalent of soiled, stained sheets. You'll want to run out of the theater straight to a Laundromat.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Skates over depravity when, like Crane, it should have dug down deeper.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

A compelling motion picture that illustrates an American tragedy and shows the transformation of a decent family man into someone whose struggles with addiction and association with the wrong man bring him to an untimely end, with no hope of retribution.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

A compelling, sympathetic portrait.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

On one level, it's an unsettling biopic and an acerbic look at a bygone media age. On another, it's a cautionary tale with uncommon relevance and bite.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The film is so explicit (endless swinging parties and porno scenes, more bouncing breasts than a Russ Meyer movie) that it finally becomes the thing it fears.

Newsweek David Ansen

It’s not a particularly sexy movie. What’s shocking to Schrader is not Crane’s promiscuity, but his obtuseness. It’s the story of the unbearable lightness of Bob.

TV Guide Ken Fox

This ultra-stylish film is far more interested in exploring its own central image -- the camera -- than the forensic minutia of the mystery.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Schrader directs with a very smooth hand, providing a good-natured and frequently amusing spin to eventually grim material that aptly reflects the protagonist's almost unfailing good humor.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The inventive performances -- keep this story interesting in spite of its puritanical framework.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Gets to you like a low-grade fever, a malaise with no known antidote. When it was over, I wasn't sure if I needed a drink, a shower or a lifelong vow of chastity.

The New Yorker David Denby

Certainly holds one's attention, but it's a strange and grim experience, ice-cold and borderline pointless. [28 October 2002, p. 119]

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Paul Schrader's movies depict dark nights of the soul, but sometimes you feel like you have to end the dark night with a shower. Auto Focus is such a movie.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

When the bloody climax comes, we look on apathetically, as desensitized to the violence as a pornographer is to sex.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Uplifting? Not bloody likely. Mesmerizing? Very, thanks to Greg Kinnear's eerie performance as Crane and director Paul Schrader's lucid depiction of the character's happy-go-lucky descent into hell.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It never answers the key question: Why should we care?

Time Richard Corliss

Schrader's objectification of sad and stupid material is neither tragic nor transgressive. It is just undramatic and uninvolving.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Auto Focus is a gutless wonder.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

It grows repetitious, both in its account of Crane's ritual behavior and in clumsily written -- and stolidly directed -- scenes between Crane and Carpenter, two men acting out their own unacknowledged sexual drama.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It's a clammy, depressing movie, but not a very illuminating one.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Kinnear's mesmerizing performance comes close to redeeming Auto Focus, suggesting depths the film never gets around to exposing, but Schrader's alternately flat and histrionic storytelling sends the film hurtling beyond redemption.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Auto Focus doesn't really go anywhere, but then neither does any form of obsessive-compulsive behavior -- which may be Schrader's point.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

This film about sex is so joyless, so astonishingly unsexy, it's like watching porn with your grandfather going tsk-tsk-tsk over your shoulder for two hours.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Schrader really isn't interested in Crane except as the straw man for his moral lessons about sin and sexuality and the nature of celebrity. Auto Focus is the perfect capper to Crane's career: Even in a movie about himself, he remains minor.

Slate David Edelstein

Schrader is like a reformed addict who isn't even honest enough to show what once gave him pleasure. He's the most dangerous kind of crusader. In Auto Focus, he makes you hate sex and movies equally.

Film Threat Phil Hall

Perhaps it is a shame that no one thought of digitally restoring and theatrically releasing the sex videos that Crane made with the many women he pleasured...that would have been far more entertaining than anything found in Auto Focus.