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80It is the greatest biblio-climax of any film since "Fahrenheit 451," although Truffaut's prayer was that reading might yet survive calamity and carry the torch of the civilized. Detachment snufffs out that faith; books it warns us, are the first thing to go. [19 March 2012, p.91]
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75Nobody's idea of "Mr. Holland's Opus," but it winds up in a similar place, more or less.
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75Adrien Brody deserves superlatives for his acting in the alternately mesmerizing and maddening Detachment.
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75When it stays in the classroom, Detachment is a scrappy testament - to the futility of even trying to reach students who are cut off from the possibilities of knowledge, and to the way that our teachers are slowly being driven nuts.
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70A movie you keep expecting to fizzle because of its punching-the-air gracelessness, but there's something weirdly effective about the artistic desperation, which includes inserts of chalkboard animation and to-the-camera testimonials.
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70Adrien Brody, delivering his finest performance since "The Pianist," plays the central role of the disaffected Henry Barthes.
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70People will either love Detachment or hate it, and either way it provides powerful testimony to the unrivaled passion and undiminished craft of director Kaye, whose notoriety in the film industry is matched by his near-total invisibility to the general public.
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67For all its untrammeled excesses - and Kaye has proved that he'd sooner torpedo his own career than accept a little constructive trammeling - Detachment is almost forcibly moving, body-slamming its audience into submission.
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63Ultimately, Detachment invites us to feel precisely what it warns against – detached.
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60The shriller its didacticism, the more unhinged it becomes. But even at its most ludicrous - when it is shouting into your ear - its sheer audacity grabs your attention.
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Mar 15, 201260Comes across like the creation of a precocious student. I don't mean that to be a damning critique, though Detachment is a mesmerizing misfire -- it's just that it has the uncomplicated earnestness and hyperbolic melodrama of teenage poetry.
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40It's nice to see righteous anger in a movie. If only the education drama Detachment knew what to do with it.
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40The movie is one big scream, clichéd and hardly credible as an oblique call to civility.
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40Scripter Lund, himself an ex-teacher, delivers a story that lacks nuance, and mixes badly with Kaye's impatient edits, Dutch angles and extreme close-ups.
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38[Director Kaye's] dedication to the material is admirable, but his tactic of following one dismal development with an even more depressing one comes to seem monotonous and pointless.
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30I didn't believe a word of the film and found myself feeling nothing but (I'm sure this wasn't Kaye's point) detachment.
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Mar 13, 201230Movies about teachers are flypaper for overblown armchair crusaderism, and this overbearingly cynical attempt gets my vote for worst offender yet.
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25The movie has an undeniable visceral power. It is also a loud, grating wallow in dime-store despair, a cheap and hollow button-puncher.
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25Detachment drives a coffin nail through a noble profession with such ruthless virulence that it makes no point at all.
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25Endng in risible bathos, Tony Kaye's urban high school melodrama is all about the cute teacher's crises and the girls who love him.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 7
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Mixed: 0 out of 7
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Negative: 0 out of 7
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Adrien Brody's performance is very good, and the movie ends up being an inspiring drama.
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10