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|
Stay
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for language and some disturbing images
Starring
Ewan McGregor,
Ryan Gosling,
Kate Burton,
Naomi Watts,
Elizabeth Reaser,
Bob Hoskins,
Janeane Garofalo,
and
B.D. Wong
In this psychological thriller, a distraught young man announces to his psychiatrist that he plans to commit suicide in three days. The psychiatrist's desperate attempts to help his new patient lead him through the city on an incredible, nightmarish trip to the place between life and death. (20th Century Fox)
| GENRE(S): |
Drama
|
Suspense/Thriller
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
David Benioff
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Marc Forster
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: March 28, 2006
Theatrical: October 21, 2005
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
99 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |

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...
88
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
The ending is an explanation, but not a solution. For a solution we have to think back through the whole film, and now the visual style becomes a guide. It is an illustration of the way the materials of life can be shaped for the purposes of the moment.

75
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
Some people find this twisty and twisted psychological thriller arty and pretentious. I find it arty and provocative.

67
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Sean Axmaker
Yet for a film so affectingly steeped in loss, resignation and the ghosts of memory, the revelation that pulls it all together, while satisfying and even touching, lacks emotional resonance.

63
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
Despite the actors, the visuals and Forster's directorial swagger, the movie lacks impact.

63
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
It's all very deep, but in a tricked-up, art-directed sort of way.

63
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
Stay is interesting, but it's hard to recommend to anyone but the small cadre of David Lynch devotees who will inhale anything with a whiff of similarity to their favorite auteur's scent.

58
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
In Stay, the director, Marc Forster, fresh from "Finding Neverland," turns Manhattan into a nightmarish dreamscape and his characters into self-destructive ghosts.

50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Rick Groen
Stay is all dressed up with no place to go, an eye-popping exercise in lavish style unattached to any discernible content.

50
Premiere
Ryan Devlin
A quarter of the way through the film, it’s all just too much.

50
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Eventually I gave up on meaning and began instead to study the profuse imagery -- and also the flat characters and anchorless performances.

50
Austin Chronicle
Marc Savlov
Forster should be commended for attempting something as daunting as the overreaching Stay, which despite all of its muddled logic and porous reality – or perhaps because of it – forces you to think, a genuine rarity these days.

50
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
Yet another variation on the theme of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." If you've read the short story, you'll see where things are going in no time flat; if you haven't and want to be surprised, don't look it up.

50
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
With its flashy, pretentious visual effects, this is really a 98-minute dream sequence--though it's worth recalling that the most effective dream sequences tend to be only a few minutes long.

42
Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer
If you're the kind of moviegoer who likes puzzling out the plots of insoluble movies, then by all means rush to see Stay, a great big blurry mess.

40
Village Voice
Rachel Aviv
In Marc Forster's humorless thriller, going insane is an exciting, luxurious affair. People suffer stylishly; depressives are angry and dirty; they make art, carry guns, and live in magnificent houses.

40
Empire
Ian Nathan
The type of movie often described as a fever-dream: weird, offbeat, otherworldly… An experience that also coincides with feeling ill.

40
Salon.com
Andrew O'Hehir
Forster and Benioff are able craftsmen who apparently thought it might be interesting to seal themselves into a narrative box with no way out. Sorry about that, guys -- I hope it was a growth experience.

40
Los Angeles Times
Carina Chocano
The final twist does more to unravel what's come before than to tie it all together, making what's come before feel like a cosmopolitan goose chase.

40
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
There's really not much of an audience for this picture. The movie demands that its viewers put the fragmented images and information together like an intellectual jigsaw puzzle, but it never gives those viewers a good reason to do so.

40
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Nathan Rabin
It's become a tired cliché for characters in "serious" science-fiction movies not to realize they're dead or dying, but Stay as a film doesn't seem to realize that it's dead from the outset, an unconvincing automaton grimly going through the motions.

40
Variety
Todd McCarthy
An ultra-arty "The Sixth Sense" that deliberately inhibits comprehension of the story until the very end -- and arguably continues to inhibit it even then -- pic features certifiably talented people on both sides of the camera collaborating on a project that probably shouldn't have been undertaken in the first place.

38
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
If "The Sixth Sense" was a bad movie redeemed by its surprise ending, Marc Forster's Stay is a seemingly good movie leading to a devastating letdown.

38
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
Gosling's been better elsewhere but delivers an adequate performance. McGregor and Watts seem baffled most of the time, as well they might be. Forster keeps us from drifting off with inventive camerawork; in this case, that's like saying a hideous suit has well-stitched lapels.

30
The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
Marc Forster takes a maximalist approach to this mumbo jumbo, which means that in addition to lots of wacky angles, shiny surfaces, seemingly endless stairs, and sets of twins, triplets and quadruplets, he deploys the unsettling vision of three talented actors - Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling - straining credulity and neck tendons in the service of serious claptrap.

30
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
That mind-bending, mystical business was better handled in such films as 1990's "Jacob's Ladder."

30
LA Weekly
Scott Foundas
A steaming compost heap of high-art pretense and half-cocked psychoanalysis that almost makes you sorry Nicolas Roeg isn't making pictures anymore.

25
San Francisco Chronicle
Neva Chonin
Visuals can't fill a spiritual vacuum, and Stay remains a pretty package that's empty on the inside.

25
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
A trite, incoherent and pretentious bomb.

25
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
Neither thrilling nor psychological, but it's chicly shot and edited and is pretty much art-directed to death.


The average user rating for this movie is 6.3 (out of 10) based on 40 User Votes
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