Brown Bunny, The

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

An honorable and often enticing piece of personal filmmaking.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Gets its teeth in you and shakes. Once it’s over, you find yourself replaying it on an endless loop in your head.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

It's hard to deny that Gallo has caught the freedom and melancholy, the intoxicating aimlessness, the lonely twilight beauty of a solo road trip in a way that no previous filmmaker quite has.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside. The Brown Bunny is still not a complete success -- it is odd and off-putting when it doesn't want to be -- but as a study of loneliness and need, it evokes a tender sadness.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The Brown Bunny is certainly about how vain Gallo is. Yet rarely has narcissism produced such a handsome work of cinema.

San Francisco Chronicle Neva Chonin

An idiosyncratic document of sexual obsession and guilt, it alienates as easily as it mesmerizes.

The New Yorker David Denby

In brief, The Brown Bunny, however antagonistic and borderline tedious, is an art work of sorts, and Gallo himself, though an egomaniac of staggering solemnity-a priest of art longing for a cult-is not a fake.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

If the independent film world were littered with alleged disasters like The Brown Bunny, the scene would be far richer for it.

Variety Derek Elley

An astonishing improvement on the original version. With 27 minutes excised, pic emerges from its mind-numbing undergrowth as a memorable -- if still highly specialized -- exercise in personal, '70s-style American filmmaking, with a cohesive feel and rhythm that marks Gallo as a distinctive indie talent.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

It's genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere. You can't accuse Gallo of pandering to anyone but himself. Not just a one-man band, he is his own entourage -- and likely to remain so. And that anguished solipsism seems to be, at least in part, the movie's subject.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

In "Buffalo 66," Gallo was an unfunny prankster. In The Brown Bunny, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he's a real filmmaker.

Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell

Yes, the film jumps up and down on a high wire over the chasm separating Pretension and Art. But that's also a form of courage.

Premiere Aaron Hillis

The film stubbornly refuses to fill empty space with dialogue or adhere to any structure other than its own downbeat atmosphere, forcing viewers to be intensely patient or squirm. It's the best film I’ve seen in a while that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Quite possibly the biggest ego trip ever to play Cannes, or anywhere else, at any time.

New York Post V.A. Musetto

As evident from The Brown Bunny and his directing debut, "Buffalo 66," Gallo is talented, although in an unconventional way. Call him an angry young man with a future.

TV Guide Ken Fox

It's actually quite interesting, albeit in a supremely self-conscious and artsy-fartsy way.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Neither an atrocity nor a revelation, The Brown Bunny is a very watchable, often beautiful-looking attempt by Mr. Gallo to reproduce the kind of loosely structured mood pieces that found American and select foreign-language cinemas of the 1960's and 70's often at their most adventurous.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Gallo's earlier work suggests he has directorial talent, but here it's buried beneath too much ego to be detectible.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

How much you enjoy the experience will depend on your take on Gallo. If you think he's a brilliant, satirical cut-up, then The Brown Bunny is an elaborate and successful art prank. If you think he's a pretentious, self-obsessed, tedious weirdo, then The Brown Bunny will back you up 100%

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

Despite its formalistic failings and truly absurd Porn Moment, there's a morbidity here that feels quite genuine, and, after the movie is over, it amounts to rough-hewn poetry.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

This bizarre little diversion will soon scamper into the wild grass, never to be seen again.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The Brown Bunny is one long, self-indulgent bore topped off with a hard-core porn scene featuring Gallo and co-star Chloë Sevigny.

Wall Street Journal Jim Fusilli

An excruciatingly embarrassing display of ego and ineptitude.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.

Slate David Edelstein

Inexpressiveness is what separates the film from its models (chiefly Antonioni) and what makes it so exasperating.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make: a 92-minute long raggedy-raunchy vision of sex, transit and alienation in which Gallo focuses on himself so obsessively, it's as if he'd become his own stalker.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

It is not the worst movie ever made, as some critics claim, but it does a passing imitation.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Only in the last third, when he gets down to the business of telling a story, does The Brown Bunny become a porn movie -- though not in the sense you'd expect.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

In his second feature as a director, Gallo acts as writer, director, producer, star, cinematographer, production designer and editor. Thus, the failure is all his.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

There are not enough synonyms for ''bad'' to describe the pretension and utter banality of the masturbatory The Brown Bunny, a film so exhaustively awful even its creator Vincent Gallo once disavowed it.