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Mixed or average reviews - based on 19 Critics What's this?

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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 19
  2. Negative: 5 out of 19
  1. 90
    While Parker and co-writer Catherine di Napoli are faithful to Melville’s plotline, they and a fully engaged supporting cast — have made the old boy's characters more quick-witted than any English Lit major would have thought possible.
  2. Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    80
    The neat thing about Jonathan Parker's modern-day Bartleby (Outsider Pictures) is that it brings out all the vaudeville undercurrents in Melville's dark tale and turns it into a surreal tragi-sitcom for our own era.
  3. Reviewed by: Joe Leydon
    60
    Although closer in tone to "Office Space" than Herman Melville, Jonathan Parker's absurdist update of Bartleby is surprisingly faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of the "Moby-Dick" author's 1853 novella about an under-achieving Wall Street copy clerk.
  4. Does little more than re-create the oppressive feeling of suffocating employment. And why put yourself through that experience without the promise of a paycheck at the other end?

See all 19 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1 out of 1
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 1
  3. Negative: 0 out of 1