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Candy
ThinkFilm


8.7

based on 24 reviews
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How did we calculate this?

based on 7 votes
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MPAA RATING: R for pervasive depiction of drug addiction, disturbing images, language, sexual content and nudity

Starring Abbie Cornish, Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush, Tony Martin, Tom Budge, and Noni Hazlehurst

A charming but reckless young poet (Ledger) has fallen in love with Candy (Cornish), a beautiful young art student from a comfortable middle-class family who is attracted to the bohemian lifestyle that Dan has long since embraced. In order to get closer to Dan, Candy whose previous drug use has been casually experimental, starts shooting up. Their passionate relationship then alternates between bursts of ecstatic oblivion and bouts of despair and self-destruction. Hooked as much on heroin as one another, their story becomes a love triangle -- a boy, a girl and a drug. (ThinkFilm)

GENRE(S):	Drama \| Foreign \| Romance
WRITTEN BY:	Neil Armfield Luke Davies (also novel Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction)
DIRECTED BY:	Neil Armfield
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: March 27, 2007 Theatrical: November 17, 2006
RUNNING TIME:	108 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	Australia

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

TV Guide Ken Fox

Neil Armfield's film hits hard because it sensitively shows how life on drugs can never be about anything else, and how the real horror of addiction is not what users do to themselves, but what they do to each other out of loneliness and despair.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Told in a serenely observational fashion.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Despite being well made and supremely acted, Candy is a true feel-bad experience.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

For all its depiction of a descent into drug addiction, Candy is filled with surprisingly sweet moments and goes down more easily than seems possible given the subject matter.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

With its intelligence, compassion, human terror and sheer loveliness, Candy is a winner despite the well-worn path it treads.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Doesn’t add anything substantively new, though it has been nicely directed by Neil Armfield, known in his country for his theater work, and features striking performances from Heath Ledger and Geoffrey Rush.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

For a druggie movie, Candy is surprisingly dynamic and involving.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray

Though it's a well-worn story, Candy does touch on a universal anxiety. For two people basking in the heat of an all-consuming love, what happens when the power gets cut off?

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Because although there are some very striking moments in Neil Armfield's debut, there are simply not enough to keep us absorbed the way a movie should.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

The way director and co-adapter Armfield shoots it, the film's awfully pretty in its grimness, in the way "Leaving Las Vegas" managed to make train-wreck alcoholism more fake-lyrical than grungy.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Cornish provides a counterbalance for Ledger's authoritative presence, turning what could have been just another heroin movie into a flawed but engrossing parable on love and sacrifice.

The Hollywood Reporter Richard James Havis

As the characters' lives fall apart, Ledger fails to bring the necessary gravitas to the role, and he looks a bit too healthy throughout.

Variety Russell Edwards

Life, love and addiction make a mostly bitter, but occasionally sweet, concoction in Oz drama Candy, which is sometimes hard to swallow.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Ledger mumbles his entire performance (some of it barely legible) as a fuzzy, friendly, happily passive heroin addict and sometime poet, as if he's too blissed out to even open his mouth as he simply drifts along with his addiction.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

What we see, though, is the same old same old - beautiful faces turning gaunt and haunted, strung-out hero and heroine, stupid parents, de-tox worse than tox, descent to and return from the depths. Candy could be seen, I suppose, as a cautionary tale; take this as a cautionary review.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

There has to be a good reason to put yourself through yet another junkie odyssey and Candy flunks the test.

Premiere Scott Warren

Ledger turns in another stellar performance and Cornish is heartbreakingly good also in this well-crafted film. But once that first plunger is pushed, the surprises are few.

Slate Dana Stevens

Geoffrey Rush is fine as a gay drug dealer who serves as an enabling Santa Claus to the doomed couple. But in the end, Candy is a little too sweet and not quite harmful enough to the audience's health.

Village Voice Rob Nelson

Any drug movie's effectiveness can be measured by the strength of its detox, and Candy doesn't sweeten the cold turkey. Still, it's a downward spiral from there in more ways than one. Never mind the neo-psychedelic-pop soundtrack and occasional double-vision cinematography: Dope just can't account for the film's fried brain cells.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

A wildly romanticized Australian druggie drama.

New York Post Kyle Smith

As the movie's feet get stuck in its own misery, it made me appreciate "Trainspotting" all over again - its wit, how it moved, the way any outcome for its characters seemed possible.

Chicago Reader Meredith Brody

A story that's reminiscent of the seminal "Panic in Needle Park."

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

Decent performances aside, the only interesting bits involve Geoffrey Rush as a chemistry professor who enables their self-abuse.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

It's neither utterly real nor utterly romantic (heroin, like alcohol, manages to be awfully and unremittingly both).

The average user rating for this movie is 8.7 (out of 10) based on 7 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Chad S. gave it a7:
Being a painter, when Candy (Abbie Cornish) moves to the countryside with Dan(Heath Ledger, who reclaims his heterosexual screen image in a scene that makes ironic use of "My Own Private Idaho"), Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner's migration to the boonies spring to mind. But then you realize that Dan doesn't do anything, so the prescient evocation becomes only half-right. Dan is no action painter; action hay bailer, yes. Candy can still be Krasner, but her influential(the bad kind) beau is the anti-muse. Dan has nothing to offer her, except his love. Is it enough? No. Candy may, or may not mature into an artist of great notoriety, but she'll never get a chance to find out if the heroin does her in. "Candy" is a love story about co-dependents(who might be star-crossed; she's middle class, he might be "white trash") that has its intermittent moments of underlining the debacle, which is the grade of diaster that drug addiction entails, with startling power and heartbreak. The sequence that documents Candy's attempt to bring life into this world stands out from the rest of "Candy" in which, like all movies about addicts, are broken into two sets of scenes; they're either stoned, or not stoned.

Helen p. gave it a10:
It's simply gorgeous!

Brian M gave it a9:
Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish are amazing!

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Candy
ThinkFilm