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88Filled with bleak, beautiful Hopperesque tableaus and strange characters whose lives intersect.
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80It's a movie full of quietly assured flourishes: elegant camera compositions, wonderful uses of silence and an entertainingly eclectic cast, including Peggy Lipton as a sensitive bartender.
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78Its doomed portrait of guileless dreamers may be found lacking in plot activity and empathetic characters. But for anyone interested in a movie that wipes clean the grungy patina of self-delusionment, Jackpot hits solid pay dirt.
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75The acting is primo and the cinematography, on high-definition video by the gifted M. David Mullen, is striking.
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75Gries and Morris act up a storm as the optimistically named Sunny Holiday and his long-suffering manager.
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70Potential irony is everywhere in this movie's subtly surreal situations and candy-colored imagery.
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63Bummer theater.
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60The more we realize that we're stuck in the company of a totally relentless loser, the drearier the entire experience becomes.
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58It's as self consciously arty and fragmented as ''Twin Falls'' was controlled and organically built.
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50In its mastery of its moments, Jackpot has charm, humor and poignancy. What it lacks is necessity. There's a sense in which we're always waiting for it to kick in.
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50Jackpot ends up a lot like Sunny's singing: pointless and more than a little flat.
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50Barely enough chuckles to keep from running out of gas. Yet it's the sharpest-looking movie shot so far on digital video, outdistancing even "The Anniversary Party."
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The filmmakers throw in an extended flatulence routine and enough graphic references to female anatomy to make "The Vagina Monologues" blush.
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50Essentially a one-gag film.
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40This dogged journey of self-delusion is interrupted periodically by snippets of footage...that promise a dark revelation that would give an edge to the otherwise tedious goings-on but, sadly, never materializes.
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40Jackpot has much that is sweet and funny, but it is not overly original--and it is overly long and not as coherent as it might be.
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40The movie is smart in small ways, yet an underachiever in big ones -- but it will probably play very well on television. On the big screen, it's distended and diffuse.
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40A candidate for quiet cult status.
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40Where "Twin Falls" was slow, brooding and haunting in a manner that fit the subject matter -- the imminent death of one of the principal characters -- Jackpot is just slow and uneventful, like a cross-country Greyhound bus trip that never stops.
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38Shows that there's a limit to how much mileage one can get from offbeat, creepy and symbiotic.
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33A very depressing movie.
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30The mood is hermetic to the point of claustrophobia, embellished with a sense of everyday surrealism indebted to David Lynch.
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30Michael and Mark Polish's debut feature, "Twin Falls, Idaho," was a cloying oddball love story involving adult male Siamese twins; their follow-up, Jackpot, is another piece of whimsical Americana.
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30Nobody hits the jackpot here, certainly not filmmakers Michael and Mark Polish, whose audacious, empathic first film, "Twin Falls Idaho," showed such promise.