Southland Tales

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Delivers equal parts overwrought tedium and mind-bending beauty, spiked with brilliant throwaway images that more than make up for Kelly's heavy-handed hot-button pretensions.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

If it arrives in final form as (still) a total mess, it's such a passionate and ambitious mess -- overcrowded with extraordinary images, incomprehensible ideas, literary and pop-cultural references and colliding subplots -- that it transcends its adolescent awkwardness and approaches being magnificent.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

In its willful, self-involved eccentricity, Southland Tales is really something else. Kelly's movie may not be entirely coherent, but that's because there's so much it wants to say.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Southland Tales has a mood unlike anything I've seen: dread that morphs into kitsch and then back again. It's a film that tried my patience, and one I couldn't shake off.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

To be clear: The odds are in favor of you hating it. I hated a lot of it when I saw a barely dry work-in-progress print, 163 minutes long, at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s 19 minutes shorter and better now, though “better” is relative when you’re dealing with a whatzahoozy such as this.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales isn't just a movie. It's an apocalyptic piñata that's been bazooka-ed open.

Empire Damon Wise

A bold and sometimes garbled take on modern American politics, this nevertheless marks an effective and surprisingly funny comeback for a film that many deemed to be DOA.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

Southland Tales pilfers large chunks of its plot and visual style from Alex Cox’s "Repo Man," Kathryn Bigelow’s "Strange Days" and Shane Carruth’s Sundance-winning "Primer," and unlike the makers of those films, Kelly hasn’t digested his influences and made them his own -- he’s more like the slacker college kid who’s just enough of an intellectual poseur to bluff his way to an A. That said, Southland Tales isn’t entirely without its pleasures, chiefly The Rock.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

You get the sense that Kelly is too angry to really find any of it funny. It's easy to empathize with his position, not so easy to remain engrossed in a film that's occasionally inspired but ultimately manic and scattered.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Andy Spletzer

It's an ambitious film, but that doesn't mean it's good.

USA Today Claudia Puig

An ambitious hodgepodge that is all bang and bluster.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Love it or laugh at it, you will gaze on Southland Tales with awe.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Dizzyingly incoherent and subversively surreal, this sophomore effort from the man who made the great, strange "Donnie Darko" is certain to have its fans. I'm not going to be one of them.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

The further Kelly bends his funhouse mirror, the more he loses sight of what it was supposed to reflect. By the end, the image has twisted beyond coherence.

Film Threat Mark Bell

The film is just too much exposition, too long, too convoluted, too many characters and ultimately a huge disappointment.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

There's a lot of "stuff" here, and Kelly's biggest problem -- he's got more than a few -- is that he can't tell his good material from his bad.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Southland Tales does have enough energy and audacity to suggest significant potential. But was it ready for public consumption? The answer is no. It's as simple as that.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

You can't be both political and incoherent, and even though Kelly's models are "Kiss Me Deadly" and "Blade Runner," this vision of the near-future suggests a random blend of "Dr. No" and "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

The English term "shambolic" best describes a slow-paced, bloated and self-indulgent picture that combines science fiction, sophomoric humor and grisly violence soaked in a music-video sensibility.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Rarely has a picture been so self-consciously designed to be a culturally meaningful touchstone, and fallen so woefully short, as Southland Tales.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

May be ambitious in its genre-defying abandon, sideswiping science fiction, satire, film noir and melodrama along the way, but it's also exasperatingly convoluted, self-amused and politically sophomoric.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

I recommend that Kelly keep right on cutting until he whittles it down to a ukulele pick.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

A mess, and that's really a shame.

Austin Chronicle Josh Rosenblatt

It appears that Kelly spent the intervening years (since "Donnie Darko") taking hallucinogenic drugs, reading Philip K. Dick novels upside down, and – most disastrously – believing his own hype.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

If a more incoherent and self-indulgent movie has been released so far this century, I'm not aware of it.