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88Gordon-Levitt won't take safe for an answer. So Don Jon tends to stumble as it finds its feet. Still, you leave this movie feeling had at instead of had. The experience is elating.
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83Gordon-Levitt proves a natural filmmaker, nimbly staging Jon's highly amusing Catholic confessions, along with porn montages that mimic the dopamine-charged editing of "Requiem for a Dream." He also gets a terrific performance out of Tony Danza as Jon's hilariously blinkered brute of a dad.
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83A beguiling romantic comedy with a heart, soul and pulse that will pleasure you for a full 90 minutes with hardly breaking a sweat.
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80Who would have thought one of the most amusing and oddly insightful romantic comedies would be built around the power and the potent pull of porn?
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80[A] deceptively sincere movie about masculinity and its discontents that Mr. Gordon-Levitt, making a fine feature directing debut, shapes into a story about a young man's moral education.
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80I’ll take messy, daring creativity like Gordon-Levitt’s over a formulaic fantasy any day.
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80A sharp turn on the romantic comedy, a movie about flawed people doing flawed things, often in funny fashion.
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80It's a comedy that moves with a sense of purpose, as Gordon-Levitt does in the title role.
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75Short, sweet, raunchy and often screamingly funny.
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75Gordon-Levitt keeps things riotous for the film's first hour, and if he eases into an ending that's a little Hollywood-standard, after having so much fun tweaking form and content, I'm guessing audiences will cut him some slack.
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75Don Jon is a disarming film that proves Gordon-Levitt’s deftness both behind the camera and in front of a computer screen, writing.
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75Johansson gives one of her best performances as the bossy, gum-chewing Jersey girl determined to change Jon into her image of a romantic hero. Tony Danza and Glenne Headly are hilarious as Jon's parents. Gordon-Levitt proves he can act, write and direct with equal dexterity.
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75Don Jon deserves praise for wearing its message lightly and yet for daring to present such a lecture in today's Internet-drenched environment. Gordon-Levitt may be blithe in discussing pornography, but his movie nonetheless asserts that porn is addictive and destructive, that it intrudes on intimacy, and that it short-circuits the capacities for interaction and also, ultimately, for pleasure. That's a serious subject and a committed viewpoint, handled with wit and intelligence.
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75Gordon-Levitt the writer-director delivers some great laugh lines and a couple of nifty plot pivots, and Gordon-Levitt the actor gives a winning performance.
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75What Don Jon is, surprisingly, is honest. R-rating aside, it should be required viewing for every 15-year-old boy on the planet.
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75Don Jon is about a man's unwitting search for intimacy, for real connection in a world where everyone is connected - by social media, by the Internet, by TV and computer and smartphone screens. That's not exactly an original idea. But Gordon-Levitt goes at it with gusto, and style. Give the guy some props.
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75Gordon-Levitt wears three hats (director, writer, actor) and all of them fit.
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75Don Jon is nominally a love triangle between a woman, a man and his laptop, but the movie is much more thoughtful and substantial than that, and it takes a compassionate and humane approach to all of its characters, even when they’re at their most despicable.
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75Behind the camera, Gordon-Levitt shows serious promise.
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75In Don Jon Gordon-Levitt hasn’t made a great movie. But he has made a fun one, short and sweet, with a third act punch that is so to-the-point it’ll take your breath away.
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Sep 24, 201375Don Jon is raunchy. The dialogue’s frank and much of what we see is explicit enough to make this a film exclusively for grown-ups. Luckily, the emotional places Gordon-Levitt takes his characters are pretty grown-up, too.
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75A funny, sly directorial debut
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70Don Jon is a continuously entertaining and fitfully provocative first-time effort from the longtime actor.
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70This is a sweet, lively and funny movie rather than a fully realized one, but it makes clear that Gordon-Levitt has a natural feeling for cinema and should do more of it.
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70The movie is a broad ethnic comedy, but there’s nothing broad about the wicked-smart way it’s executed.
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70Gordon-Levitt’s script can be a bit on-the-nose at times, but that’s an indulgence easily forgiven in a debut feature, and this ensemble winningly sells the movie’s tricky tonal mix.
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67Well made as it is, Don Jon suffers from a half-baked scenario that never manages to make its characters as intriguing as the problems that afflict its protagonist. It's a movie that shows better than it tells, even as it leaves much up to the imagination.
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67Don Jon is so friskily risque, with teasing glimpses of what turns Jon on and frank dialogue to match, that you don't notice the movie is stuck in a rut until Julianne Moore shows up late, offering Jon an older, wiser perspective on sex and relationships.
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63What becomes increasingly apparent is that Gordon-Levitt hasn’t exactly decided what Jon’s problem is, in a character that seems partly an expression of male wish fulfilment.
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63Gordon-Levitt is a victim of his own success here. He plays such a convincing cad that we don’t believe or invest in his redemption.
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Apr 11, 201360A fun, occasionally flabby romp that should find its audience.
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58True love beckons in the guise of a dingbat played by Julianne Moore and all is right with the world. As Jon’s father, a man whose lifeblood is yelling, Tony Danza is very funny. He makes you understand what his son is escaping from.
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58To Gordon-Levitt’s credit, he neatly sidesteps the moralizing message his film seems to be building toward. The hero’s problem is not that he jerks off too much; as articulated by widowed, pot-smoking classmate Julianne Moore — the only real human being onscreen — it’s that he’s never actually connected to another person through sex.
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50I like Mr. Gordon-Levitt a lot as an actor, and I wish him only the best in his future work as a filmmaker. There is, however, the matter of this particular movie, an overheated disquisition on the pleasures and limitations of masturbation.
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50Although the film’s character portraits are vividly drawn, they remain largely one-dimensional.
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50He (Gordon-Levitt) can act, and there’s a possibility he can also direct, but there’s no evidence in Don Jon that he can do both at the same time.
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40As with many a first feature, Gordon-Levitt’s so-so directorial debut is pumped up with ambition. The early scenes, heavy on caricature, promise to puncture much of the cocky illusions surrounding modern relationships.
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38A sex comedy that just lays there and expects you to do all the work. Gordon-Levitt's direction is repetitive and dry, and his screenplay is a collage of badly cut out pieces from other movies.
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38Joseph Gordon-Levitt's directorial debut does for porn-dependence what Shame did for sex addiction by offering a surface-level look at the effects of its specific pathology on its lead male character.
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30Crude, repetitive and rigorously single-minded, the popular actor’s writing and directing debut lays it all on a bit thick, as the few points the film has to make are underscored time and time again.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 18 out of 23
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Mixed: 2 out of 23
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Negative: 3 out of 23
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Sep 27, 20131
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