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100I love love love love loved Cold Souls. That might be because I love love love Paul Giamatti.
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91Darkly funny, twisty-cool existential tragicomedy, loaded with smart notions and filmed like a surrealist dream.
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88Barthes takes her notion and runs with it, and Giamatti and Strathairn follow fearlessly.
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88Paul Giamatti - that huddle of broiling instincts, out-of-control impulses and aggravated ardor epitomized in "Sideways" - you feel his soul's absence as dearly as its presence.
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80Anchored by a great Giamatti performance, Cold Souls is built around a terrific idea and has serious fun with it. It also marks Barthes as a filmmaker to watch.
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80Cold Souls has its flaws, and it threatens to sag into a Paul-like morbidity, but Giamatti’s anxious mien and unspectacular shamblings have never been better deployed.
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75You'll laugh till it hurts at Cold Souls.
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75Cold Souls entertains on its own terms, delivering irony and suspense as Giamatti discovers that his soulless self is a terrible, terrible actor.
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75The low-key satire would have benefited from more of a back story to Giamatti's character and a clearer sense of his relationship with his wife. But what we do get is compelling in the way of an indelible, dreamy short story.
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75The movie turns what could have been a tedious meta-movie exercise into a sincere dour farce.
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75The chief pleasure to be derived from watching Cold Souls is that it's a journey into the unexpected.
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75He's (Giamatti) terrific throughout, although the movie, which is more clever than funny, sometimes resembles second-tier Charlie Kaufman stuff.
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Giamatti is aptly cast, playing his own persona with awkward anxiety and suitably skewed humor.
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70Works precisely because its ambitions are somewhat mellow; this isn't a relentlessly high-strung picture. Barthes and Giamatti do more with less, turning the idea of excessive navel-gazing into a kind of game.
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It may be only in the film's last ambiguous, evocative image that Barthes and Parekh finally transcend the material and arrive at something beautiful and ineffable.
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Somewhere between the rabbit-hole absurdist comedy of Charlie Kaufman and a navel-gazing Woody Allen film is the somberly humorous indie Cold Souls.
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70In this attractive, smart-enough, finally un-brave movie Ms. Barthes peeks at the dark comedy of the soul only to beat a quick, pre-emptive retreat.
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70An amusing slice of existential whimsy with an Eastern European bent, Cold Souls posits a world in which humans can have their souls extracted and implanted in each others’ bodies.
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70If not always coherent, at least compelling.
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67Giamatti is masterful.
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67The movie still works as a clever little "Twilight Zone" episode with great production values, and it's an impressively ambitious debut for Barthes.
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67The premise seems profound, but the claustrophobically inert execution lacks reach or imagination.
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63Giamatti tries very hard to put over Cold Souls -- some of his reaction shots are priceless -- but it's going to leave some people, well, cold.
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60Giamatti is one of the few guys who could take a joke about a chickpea-sized soul and make a meal of it.
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Only a temporarily compelling conflict for a feature-length film.
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50Cold Souls begins to lose its comic focus, however, when Giamatti comes to realize that he needs his soul back.
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50The more elaborate the plot becomes, the sillier it gets.
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50Paul Giamatti plays himself in a dark indie comedy that's distinguished by a sci-fi theme and surrealistic touches but ends without a payoff.