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100No actor is better than Bill Murray at doing nothing at all, and being fascinating while not doing it. Buster Keaton had the same gift for contemplating astonishing developments with absolute calm. Buster surrounded himself with slapstick, and in Broken Flowers Jim Jarmusch surrounds Murray with a parade of formidable women.
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100Exhilaratingly slow, which for many will simply mean SLOW... Those who can downshift appropriately, however, stand to be enraptured.
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100A movie of uncommon sweetness and delight.
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91An engaging exercise in mature poignancy, existential consciousness and deadpan drollery, Broken Flowers is a return by Jarmusch to the road movie structure of such films as "Stranger Than Paradise," "Night on Earth" and "Dead Man."
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90Murray's performance is at once enormously generous and fiercely, concisely witty.
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90It's a romantic comedy in which both the romance and the comedy are turned to such muted levels that any lower would require closed captioning.
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90Murray and Jarmusch, two modern masters of minimalism, triumphantly join forces in Broken Flowers, a bittersweet tour de force about a wealthy, deeply depressed lothario.
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90With elegant restraint the film subtly intimates the wintry dead end-twilight years bereft of love, partner, or vocation-that may be in store for its aged lover man. (Payne's "About Schmidt" did too, when not gorging snidely on idiot Americana.)
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90Like a perfect, short-lived love affair, its pleasure is accompanied by a palpable sting of sorrow. It leaves you wanting more, which I mean entirely as a compliment.
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90Funny, bittersweet, its understatement yielding surprising depth charges, Broken Flowers is a triumph of close observation and telling details.
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90The ending is madly unsatisfying--yet dead perfect. This is a remarkable film.
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88Broken Flowers may be too low-key for laugh junkies, but Jarmusch fills his sharply observed comedy with wonderful mischief. The mix of humor and heartbreak brings out the best in Murray.
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88A dark subject certainly, but in Murray's bouquet-bearing hands, it can still hand us a laugh.
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88This is not a perfect picture, but it's a soulful one that offers a lot of pleasure and even a kind of wisdom.
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83It's a consciousness-raising personal odyssey in the tradition of such recent indie hits as "Sideways" and "About Schmidt" -- only less obviously comedic and, as always with Jarmusch, blissfully unresolved.
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80All the actresses (including Tilda Swinton as ex number four) give wonderful performances in the short screen time each of them is allowed.
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80If you're shopping for neatly tied bundles of plot and the rigid arcs of "character development" common to mainstream movies, look elsewhere. Whether he's playing on the road or at home, Jarmusch always throws a lot of off-speed stuff, and that's his glory.
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80Working in his typically idiosyncratic and episodic vein, Jim Jarmusch has nonetheless pitched the film slightly more toward mainstream tastes than usual for him, using excellent thesps in the service of accessible material.
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Jarmusch's uncharacteristically mainstream -- wonderful -- road trip movie.
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80Take this trip with him and chances are, you'll find the journey increasingly funny and touching.
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80Jarmusch manages to imbue banality with surprising beauty and humor.
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78Broken Flowers is as elliptical as the haunting jazz music by Mulatu Astatke that permeates the soundtrack.
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75A haunting, poetic film, and yet it suffers two major failings. First, Murray provides too blank a slate for the audience to appreciate whatever insights a more expressive performance might have offered. Second, and far more troubling, is the way Jarmusch refuses to take his female characters seriously.
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75This is Murray's subtlest performance, and one of his best.
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75For actresses of a certain age, Jarmusch's film amounts to a full-employment act...Best are Stone, transparent in her desire, and Conroy, completely opaque.
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75A study of middle-class, middle-aged disappointment in its varying forms, a sober look at different life choices.
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75Flowers is smartly observational -- but a little screen heat would be worth a bouquet.
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75In the wasteland of August releases, this entry shines like a beacon lighting the way to a theater.
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75It forces you to fill in the blanks, then refuses to judge whether you're right or wrong. It's almost like the audience writes its own script, and everybody appreciates his or her own work.
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70It skips merrily along the surface with its over-the-top vignettes but never seems to arrive at a destination. Nevertheless, the journey is more than half the fun as every actor attacks his role with relish.
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70It's hard to fully empathize with Don's season of remorse. It's the big problem with Broken Flowers, and one I don't think the movie -- for all of its funny and occasionally poignant touches -- ever really transcends.
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70Murray's linking up with Jim Jarmusch is a case of Mr. Cool meeting Mr. Cool, and the result is intriguing and elegant, but not quite satisfying.
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70Jarmusch's narrative setups are often artificial and implausible, but his stories are usually charming anyway because the sense of character runs deeper than plot.
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It's like watching a man trying to scratch an itch by eating an egg. It doesn't address the problem. It's also the sort of thing that Europeans love to think about America -- everybody looking, nobody finding -- and it might explain why this decent, but by no means great, film won the Grand Prix at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.
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60The film ends on an ambiguous note that will infuriate some viewers and strike others as the only possible finale to Don's sad absurdist journey.
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60Possibly the most European of major American directors, Jim Jarmusch wears his influences on his sleeve and makes no bones about it.
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60Well-meaning but remote picture.
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60The five episodes in Broken Flowers are good enough to make us expect that the picture has a theme, but it hasn't.
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Audiences will laugh, mainly to prove they're awake, but the humor is pretty thin.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 46 out of 98
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Mixed: 16 out of 98
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Negative: 36 out of 98
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NickN10
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8
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JoelP.1Terrible, boring film. This is not entertainment.