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100Is Joaquin Phoenix putting us on? After watching the terrifying, near-brilliant exposé I'm Still Here, in which the Oscar nominee's public and private unraveling becomes a sick joke, the question doesn't matter.
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91An artful piece of exploitation vérité.
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88A meditation on a life lived in the public eye, I'm Still Here is strange, riveting, and occasionally appalling stuff, any way you look at it.
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88Whether true or a hoax, I'm Still Here represents real risk-taking that I can only applaud.
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80I'm Still Here does leave us with one big question mark: What will Phoenix do next? How will he top such a flamboyant caper?
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80There's a thrilling madness to Phoenix's Method.
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75A sad and painful documentary that serves little useful purpose other than to pound another nail into the coffin. Here is a gifted actor who apparently by his own decision has brought desolation upon his head.
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75Regardless of its veracity, this portrait of a drug-addled star who just wants to express himself artistically contains implications that exceed the filmmakers' intentions.
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75You've never been quite this close to a movie star, and after enduring the experience you'll likely never want to repeat it.
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75If this is a documentary, it's a profoundly embarrassing one, in which Affleck has exposed Phoenix's soul and found it shallow and damaged. If it's a mockumentary, though, its greatest value is in pointing out the media's gullibility, and reminding audiences that even in an age of limited privacy, they still have to question what they're told and even what they witness themselves. It's cruel either way, but riveting nonetheless.
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This sporadically engrossing mockumentary, which gets better as it rolls along, must have been planned way back before Phoenix bombed on "Late Show With David Letterman."
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70It's effective, entertaining in a remarkably uncomfortable way but entertaining all the same.
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70My guess is that after years of being the trick pony, he wanted to see what it was like to be the ringmaster.
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70An utterly fascinating experiment that apparently blends real and faked material to examine notions of celebrity, mental stability and friendship.
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63Affleck's provocative, postmodern take on JP as half-joke, half-victim is the damnedest plunge into the dark heart of our "reality" culture since Sacha Baron Cohen invented Borat.
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63Parts of it are close to genius; most of it is actively torturous to watch.
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63One suspects the truth will only be revealed if or when Phoenix starts acting again. Certainly on this evidence, he's no great shakes at hip-hop.
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60Affleck's meta-satire riffs amusingly on celebrity culture without hitting too many faux-doc highs.
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50The movie is as damnably perplexing as the subject himself.
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At once deeply felt and devastatingly cynical, I'm Still Here's bone-dry satire couldn't exist without the celebrity media feedback loop. But its apparent attack on the Hollywood machine is so insidery, so vicious, that to us-the everyday consumer-it's just not clear why this stunt needed to exist at all.
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40It's hard not to feel punk'd and trapped amid the company of jerks.
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38It's all tiresome, muddied and artlessly made.
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35The problem is, whether real, not real, or some Spector-headed stepchild of the two, meltdowns are still not inherently interesting.
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30Fake or not, I'm Still Here is no fun to watch, and in fact Phoenix's situation comes off as so dire that it becomes a reason to doubt the film's authenticity. Filming someone having a mental breakdown is embarrassing and exploitative at best.
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25If there was ever a human being who needed a visit from the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, this is the guy.
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25It's really not much fun - in fact it's painful - to watch an actor on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It almost doesn't matter if the psyche in question is imploding artificially - as in staged - or organically.
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25Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen's rude semi-documentary satires (Borat, Bruno), I'm Still Here never finds a satiric justification for all this grotesque behaviour.
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12When I'm Still Here reached its climactic moment -- Joaquin Phoenix puking into a toilet -- I had never before felt quite so much like a toilet.
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0Rarely has the question of a documentary's artifice mattered less. I genuinely hated this picture, almost as much as I've admired Phoenix's work in everything from "Gladiator" to "Walk the Line" and even the hackneyed but affecting "Two Lovers."
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0The whole thing is such a tedious, foul-mouthed mess that it isn't even worth discussing as a riff on the Bob Dylan doc "Don't Look Back" or a meditation on slovenly semi-madness.
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0I'm Still Here is amateurishly shot and edited, as if ineptness equaled some higher level of veracity. Ironically, it's the only Joaquin Phoenix movie anyone has cared about in years.
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0The worst thing about I'm Still Here is the fact that it exists.
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0To judge from this agonizing documentary, sniveling man-child Joaquin Phoenix was put on earth to make us appreciate Crispin Glover for the level-headed fellow he is.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 12
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Mixed: 1 out of 12
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Negative: 1 out of 12
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This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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10A work of art. Misunderstood by many...but its acting at its finest and a masterful social experiment.
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