Metascore
51 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 30 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 15 out of 30
  2. Negative: 9 out of 30
  1. An honorable and often enticing piece of personal filmmaking.
  2. 78
    Gets its teeth in you and shakes. Once it’s over, you find yourself replaying it on an endless loop in your head.
  3. 75
    Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside. The Brown Bunny is still not a complete success -- it is odd and off-putting when it doesn't want to be -- but as a study of loneliness and need, it evokes a tender sadness.
  4. Reviewed by: Neva Chonin
    75
    An idiosyncratic document of sexual obsession and guilt, it alienates as easily as it mesmerizes.
  5. 75
    The Brown Bunny is certainly about how vain Gallo is. Yet rarely has narcissism produced such a handsome work of cinema.
  6. It's hard to deny that Gallo has caught the freedom and melancholy, the intoxicating aimlessness, the lonely twilight beauty of a solo road trip in a way that no previous filmmaker quite has.
  7. 70
    In "Buffalo 66," Gallo was an unfunny prankster. In The Brown Bunny, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he's a real filmmaker.
  8. 70
    If the independent film world were littered with alleged disasters like The Brown Bunny, the scene would be far richer for it.
  9. 70
    It's genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere. You can't accuse Gallo of pandering to anyone but himself. Not just a one-man band, he is his own entourage -- and likely to remain so. And that anguished solipsism seems to be, at least in part, the movie's subject.
  10. Reviewed by: Derek Elley
    70
    An astonishing improvement on the original version. With 27 minutes excised, pic emerges from its mind-numbing undergrowth as a memorable -- if still highly specialized -- exercise in personal, '70s-style American filmmaking, with a cohesive feel and rhythm that marks Gallo as a distinctive indie talent.
  11. 70
    In brief, The Brown Bunny, however antagonistic and borderline tedious, is an art work of sorts, and Gallo himself, though an egomaniac of staggering solemnity-a priest of art longing for a cult-is not a fake.
  12. Reviewed by: M. E. Russell
    67
    Yes, the film jumps up and down on a high wire over the chasm separating Pretension and Art. But that's also a form of courage.
  13. 63
    As evident from The Brown Bunny and his directing debut, "Buffalo 66," Gallo is talented, although in an unconventional way. Call him an angry young man with a future.
  14. Quite possibly the biggest ego trip ever to play Cannes, or anywhere else, at any time.
  15. Reviewed by: Aaron Hillis
    63
    The film stubbornly refuses to fill empty space with dialogue or adhere to any structure other than its own downbeat atmosphere, forcing viewers to be intensely patient or squirm. It's the best film I’ve seen in a while that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.
  16. Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    60
    It's actually quite interesting, albeit in a supremely self-conscious and artsy-fartsy way.
  17. Neither an atrocity nor a revelation, The Brown Bunny is a very watchable, often beautiful-looking attempt by Mr. Gallo to reproduce the kind of loosely structured mood pieces that found American and select foreign-language cinemas of the 1960's and 70's often at their most adventurous.
  18. Gallo's earlier work suggests he has directorial talent, but here it's buried beneath too much ego to be detectible.
  19. Despite its formalistic failings and truly absurd Porn Moment, there's a morbidity here that feels quite genuine, and, after the movie is over, it amounts to rough-hewn poetry.
  20. Reviewed by: Carina Chocano
    50
    How much you enjoy the experience will depend on your take on Gallo. If you think he's a brilliant, satirical cut-up, then The Brown Bunny is an elaborate and successful art prank. If you think he's a pretentious, self-obsessed, tedious weirdo, then The Brown Bunny will back you up 100%
  21. This bizarre little diversion will soon scamper into the wild grass, never to be seen again.
  22. 38
    The Brown Bunny is one long, self-indulgent bore topped off with a hard-core porn scene featuring Gallo and co-star Chloë Sevigny.
  23. Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    30
    Inexpressiveness is what separates the film from its models (chiefly Antonioni) and what makes it so exasperating.
  24. Reviewed by: Jim Fusilli
    30
    An excruciatingly embarrassing display of ego and ineptitude.
  25. It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.
  26. The kind of fascinatingly bad film only a really gifted and fearless moviemaker could make: a 92-minute long raggedy-raunchy vision of sex, transit and alienation in which Gallo focuses on himself so obsessively, it's as if he'd become his own stalker.
  27. It is not the worst movie ever made, as some critics claim, but it does a passing imitation.
  28. 20
    Only in the last third, when he gets down to the business of telling a story, does The Brown Bunny become a porn movie -- though not in the sense you'd expect.
  29. In his second feature as a director, Gallo acts as writer, director, producer, star, cinematographer, production designer and editor. Thus, the failure is all his.
  30. 0
    There are not enough synonyms for ''bad'' to describe the pretension and utter banality of the masturbatory The Brown Bunny, a film so exhaustively awful even its creator Vincent Gallo once disavowed it.
User Score

Mixed or average reviews- based on 29 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 21
  2. Negative: 12 out of 21
  1. 893ru8943u
    9
    For those who didn't enjoy this film, may I suggest Dane Cooke's My Best Friend's Girl or perhaps Seann William Scott's Balls Out. Those films aren't contrived at all and I have a feeling they'll be more up your alley. Full Review »
  2. ZachC.
    9
    I saw the Cannes version and although it was slow, I did not hate it. Recently I purchased the film, being a complete narcissist just as Brown Bunny, Vincent Gallo is. And, I was absolutely floored by how he was able to polish this film into a gem. Although Chloe Sevigny's part is minimal, she could not have played her role better. The same goes from the young female who played Violet. This film does not have the dimensions that Gallo's other full-length, Buffalo '66 has and therefore I do not think Vincent Gallo was able to give the performance of a lifetime. This being said, he was believable throughout. As a struggling screenwriter, I know how hard it is to keep the viewers' attentions. Vincent Gallo kept me completely enticed throughout the entire film, where 95% of the scenes take place with one man driving crosscountry in a van. Few filmmakers would be able to mimmick this. For that alone, this film was great. Full Review »
  3. JasonB.
    10
    This movie took off slow, but shook me to my core by the time it was over. I couldn't stop thinking about for over a week. Vincent Gallo did not set out to direct Garden State! I'm sorry if your attention span didn't allow you to sit thru this beautiful film. This film requires a little more thought than the average pop cum indie fair. Full Review »