Dreamers, The

Premiere Glenn Kenny

The thrills of this movie are aesthetic ones, the creation of new, ravishing imagery (and all three of our young heroes are beautiful enough to be up to this task), the surrender to dream logic, the adoration of the silver screen.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The film is extraordinarily beautiful. Bertolucci is one of the great painters of the screen.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

An ambitious and exciting piece of work, a movie about sex and movies made by a filmmaker who understands the power of each to set off fantasy, create addiction, incite danger and transform the spirit.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Ablaze with poetry and danger, and suffused with an odd kind of intellectual kitsch.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

As tawdry as this may seem, Bertolucci is not trying to one-up himself. He was 27 when the student riots occurred and very much a participant in a revolution that was both complex in its implications and naive in much of the behavior. He has caught that perfectly

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

The Dreamers argues that life must be lived, not dreamt. But it also remembers the confounding pleasures of dreaming with your eyes wide open.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

The Dreamers is a real humdinger, at once an intimate romance, a glimpse into a rather unconventional friendship and a beautifully focused celebration of cinema itself.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

The Dreamers, which is disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting, fuses sexual discovery with political tumult by means of a heady, heedless romanticism that nearly obscures the film's patient, skeptical intelligence.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Best when it recreates the cultural and political ferment of the era, capturing the idealism that made youths push against the social boundaries imposed on them by elders.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The Dreamers may go slack when you most want it to soar, but it also seduces with eroticism and resonates with ideas.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The Dreamers isn't that bad -- actually, it's funny, affecting, interestingly twisted, and seriously erotic before it heads south in the final stretch.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Unfortunately, there's no great performance here. Pitt (who looks like Leonardo Di Caprio) delivers nothing close to Brando's tour de force, and all three stars may have been chosen less for their acting ability than their willingness to disrobe for the camera.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

By equal measure tragic and hopeful, it is both a love song to escapism and a warm embrace of the real world.

Newsweek David Ansen

The tale is a bit too insular and claustrophobic for its own good: in the end these characters lack the depth and complexity to resonate deeply. The pleasures of The Dreamers stay mostly on the surface. But when the surface is as stylish and sexy as this, it's hard to complain.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

The Dreamers is a universal story, one that captures the thrill of discovering culture, sex, and politics, and the painful twinge of learning that those worlds aren't enough.

LA Weekly F. X. Feeney

Among the pleasures the film evokes, as few films have, is the bliss of conversation.

TV Guide Ethan Alter

Ultimately, the film works best when viewed as a tone poem that examines the present through the prism of the past.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

Gorgeously shot, cleverly directed, smartly scripted and convincingly performed, The Dreamers is itself something of a movie puzzle.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

For all the flash and sparkle, there's little heat. The Dreamers wants to be "First Tango in Paris." It's more like "Last Tango Under Glass."

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

The Dreamers is infused with the same kind of wistful melancholy that made the French New Wave films so winning, and it’s all gorgeous to look at.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

My guess is that The Dreamers will have a certain resonance for those of us who discovered movies and sex at the same time during the '60s. For the rest of you, the film is a curiosity about cinegenic youths baring their bodies while thinking they are baring their souls.

USA Today Mike Clark

The problem is the letdown you feel when these glorious morsels (film clips and soundtrack) end, and it's back to three morose schlumps.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

As the threesome's movie games push them into an incestuous menage a trois, the movie loses its grip.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

The overall effect of the film is melancholy: it seems desperate for the past.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

He doesn’t entirely succeed, but the attempt has poignancy: As uneven as much of his recent work has been, Bertolucci's still in love with the movies, and his ardor--if not always the ends he puts it to--is exhilarating.

Empire Kim Newman

It seesaws between disturbing psychosis and freewheeling nouvelle vague romance, then turns awkwardly editorial in the last reel.

Slate David Edelstein

It doesn't entirely gel, but few directors could explore the collision of the ego and the outside world with such sympathy or purpose. It's possible that the NC-17 has never been used to such PG-13 ends.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Watchable if far-fetched movie is seriously marred by its three leads; only Garrel manages to suggest a person rather than a fashion model dutifully following instructions.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Lives down to its title -- what an odd and gauzy reverie this is, a strangely muted picture that unfolds at a distinct remove from the reality around it.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

More unfortunately still, the elements of the story fit poorly, like a Tucker decked out as a sexmobile.

Variety David Rooney

The whole spirit of rebellion, passion and protest that should be a driving force for the characters plays more like a cultivated affectation.

Film Threat Kevin Carr

It wasn't as good as the films it cites, but at least it didn't bore me.

The Hollywood Reporter Jean Oppenheimer

The film's real failure is that neither the story nor the characters capture the zeitgeist that Bertolucci theoretically set out to celebrate.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

In The Dreamers, Bertolucci wants to take us back to a more revolutionary time, but mostly he ends up recalling the faded revolution of his own glory days.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Does have its pleasures, but the feeling is inescapable that the person most pleased is Bertolucci himself. In essence he is the dreamer of the title, as eager to retreat into this hermetic world of his own creation as his characters are into theirs. Fair enough, but why does he have to drag us along with him?

The New Yorker David Denby

Bertolucci is trying hard to shock us with this stuff, but, for all the perversities and the abundant nudity, the movie has an air of inconsequence about it. [9 February 2004, p. 74]

Time Richard Schickel

Dispassionate, curiously lifeless, lacking the energy of either youthful commitment or a deeply engaged re-examination of the past.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

The Dreamers is bad, but unlike the similarly camped-up "Little Buddha" or "Stealing Beauty," it's not exactly boring.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

It may give many viewers a licentious flutter, but the highbrow ingredient -- although it desperately wants to be there -- is missing.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

A miracle of badness, a kind of art- house "Showgirls" -- which actually exceeds "Showgirls" in its self-indulgence, shallowness and sheer stupidity.