Candy
Metascore
57 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 24 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 10 out of 24
  2. Mixed: 14 out of 24
  3. Negative: 0 out of 24
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  1. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    88
    Neil Armfield's film hits hard because it sensitively shows how life on drugs can never be about anything else, and how the real horror of addiction is not what users do to themselves, but what they do to each other out of loneliness and despair.
  2. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Ruthe Stein
    75
    For all its depiction of a descent into drug addiction, Candy is filled with surprisingly sweet moments and goes down more easily than seems possible given the subject matter.
  3. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    75
    Told in a serenely observational fashion.
  4. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    75
    Despite being well made and supremely acted, Candy is a true feel-bad experience.
  5. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Andrew O'Hehir
    70
    With its intelligence, compassion, human terror and sheer loveliness, Candy is a winner despite the well-worn path it treads.
  6. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Carina Chocano
    70
    For a druggie movie, Candy is surprisingly dynamic and involving.
  7. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    70
    Doesn’t add anything substantively new, though it has been nicely directed by Neil Armfield, known in his country for his theater work, and features striking performances from Heath Ledger and Geoffrey Rush.
  8. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Noel Murray
    67
    Though it's a well-worn story, Candy does touch on a universal anxiety. For two people basking in the heat of an all-consuming love, what happens when the power gets cut off?
  9. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Phillips
    63
    The way director and co-adapter Armfield shoots it, the film's awfully pretty in its grimness, in the way "Leaving Las Vegas" managed to make train-wreck alcoholism more fake-lyrical than grungy.
  10. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Elizabeth Weitzman
    63
    Because although there are some very striking moments in Neil Armfield's debut, there are simply not enough to keep us absorbed the way a movie should.
  11. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Richard James Havis
    60
    As the characters' lives fall apart, Ledger fails to bring the necessary gravitas to the role, and he looks a bit too healthy throughout.
  12. Variety
    Reviewed by: Russell Edwards
    60
    Life, love and addiction make a mostly bitter, but occasionally sweet, concoction in Oz drama Candy, which is sometimes hard to swallow.
  13. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Desson Thomson
    60
    Cornish provides a counterbalance for Ledger's authoritative presence, turning what could have been just another heroin movie into a flawed but engrossing parable on love and sacrifice.
  14. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Sean Axmaker
    58
    Ledger mumbles his entire performance (some of it barely legible) as a fuzzy, friendly, happily passive heroin addict and sometime poet, as if he's too blissed out to even open his mouth as he simply drifts along with his addiction.
  15. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Kyle Smith
    50
    As the movie's feet get stuck in its own misery, it made me appreciate "Trainspotting" all over again - its wit, how it moved, the way any outcome for its characters seemed possible.
  16. Premiere
    Reviewed by: Scott Warren
    50
    Ledger turns in another stellar performance and Cornish is heartbreakingly good also in this well-crafted film. But once that first plunger is pushed, the surprises are few.
  17. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    50
    A wildly romanticized Australian druggie drama.
  18. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    50
    There has to be a good reason to put yourself through yet another junkie odyssey and Candy flunks the test.
  19. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Marc Mohan
    50
    Decent performances aside, the only interesting bits involve Geoffrey Rush as a chemistry professor who enables their self-abuse.
  20. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Rob Nelson
    50
    Any drug movie's effectiveness can be measured by the strength of its detox, and Candy doesn't sweeten the cold turkey. Still, it's a downward spiral from there in more ways than one. Never mind the neo-psychedelic-pop soundtrack and occasional double-vision cinematography: Dope just can't account for the film's fried brain cells.
  21. Slate
    Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
    50
    Geoffrey Rush is fine as a gay drug dealer who serves as an enabling Santa Claus to the doomed couple. But in the end, Candy is a little too sweet and not quite harmful enough to the audience's health.
  22. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    50
    What we see, though, is the same old same old - beautiful faces turning gaunt and haunted, strung-out hero and heroine, stupid parents, de-tox worse than tox, descent to and return from the depths. Candy could be seen, I suppose, as a cautionary tale; take this as a cautionary review.
    All this critic's reviews
  23. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Meredith Brody
    50
    A story that's reminiscent of the seminal "Panic in Needle Park."
  24. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    40
    It's neither utterly real nor utterly romantic (heroin, like alcohol, manages to be awfully and unremittingly both).

User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
8.5 out of 10

Universal acclaim- based on 17 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 3
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 3
  3. Negative: 0 out of 3
  1. ChadS.
    7
    Being a painter, when Candy (Abbie Cornish) moves to the countryside with Dan(Heath Ledger, who reclaims his heterosexual screen image in a scene that makes ironic use of "My Own Private Idaho"), Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner's migration to the boonies spring to mind. But then you realize that Dan doesn't do anything, so the prescient evocation becomes only half-right. Dan is no action painter; action hay bailer, yes. Candy can still be Krasner, but her influential(the bad kind) beau is the anti-muse. Dan has nothing to offer her, except his love. Is it enough? No. Candy may, or may not mature into an artist of great notoriety, but she'll never get a chance to find out if the heroin does her in. "Candy" is a love story about co-dependents(who might be star-crossed; she's middle class, he might be "white trash") that has its intermittent moments of underlining the debacle, which is the grade of diaster that drug addiction entails, with startling power and heartbreak. The sequence that documents Candy's attempt to bring life into this world stands out from the rest of "Candy" in which, like all movies about addicts, are broken into two sets of scenes; they're either stoned, or not stoned.… Full Review »
  2. Helenp.
    10
    It's simply gorgeous!
  3. BrianM
    9
    Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish are amazing!
See all user reviews »