- Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
- Release Date: Sep 14, 2001
- Critic Score
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80Not all of the jokes hit, but enough of them do that anyone who's ever filed, collated, or played Mixmaster DJ with the transcribing machine will find cathartic giggles in this breakout debut.
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80A ragtag charmer. You will laugh.
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80A sly and captivating comedy of imaginative leaps and gently orchestrated pandemonium.
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75The result is a winning comedy.
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75Delivers deliciously low blows at corporate America, office politics and the lengths people will go to avoid work.
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70There are a few weak spots -- the ending could have used some fine tuning -- but otherwise its a solid sleeper: unassuming, unexpected and wholly entertaining.
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70The charm and the shoddiness of Haiku Tunnel stem from the same source. It's basically a San Francisco underground theater production that somehow escaped onto the movie screen without losing any of its eccentric, insular qualities.
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70It's unpretentiously low-tech and humorously offbeat. And against all odds, the filmmaker emerges as a star.
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70The vision of office work that's offered up by Haiku Tunnel is as chilling as it is funny.
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67They try too hard to be funny. It's hardly a damning fault, but it has a tendency to drown out their satiric observations.
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63However refreshing it is to see a movie about the secretary rather than the lawyer -- there is a long wait for the light at the end of the Haiku Tunnel.
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63They're a far cry from the Coen brothers, or even the Polish brothers, but Josh and Jacob Kornbluth emerge intact from their first filmmaking venture and score more hits than misses in this comedy.
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60While it plays more like stage or TV sketch-comedy shtick than film material, this modest, visually unimposing production remains entertaining thanks to its ironic observations and winning sense of folly.
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58Pleasant and light and builds nicely within its own self-circumscribed intent.
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50A funny movie, but like "Josh" himself, it's too self-absorbed, and maybe too nice, for its own good.
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50Already too long. It makes you want to start moving globs of dirt to tunnel out of the theater as the movie ends with the famous theme to "The Great Escape."
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50After a few very funny early sequences, tricked up with grotesque, surreal editing and camerawork, the movie gets bogged down a bit during the first third.
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40No doubt this effort will find its fans, as it should, but there's a lot of lost potential.
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40The Kornbluths don't offer much visual style -- the film is as flat and sterile as its corporate environs -- but they build an excruciating tension from Kornbluth's confounding inability to lick a few stamps.
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40Some of the gags here are funny, but they aren't executed effectively enough to score.
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20Can a feature-length movie be built on minutiae like jammed copying machines, unsent business letters and orientation programs for new employees? This innocuous wisp of a film, as weighty as a scrap of fax paper caught in an updraft, suggests that the answer is no.
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12Amazingly amateurish, the film lands wide of satirical targets that should be impossible to miss.
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10Let's not waste any time: This movie is just awful. Prime problem: Josh Kornbluth, the chubby, wild-haired, bug-eyed star.