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A brilliantly honed tale of dementia, starring a skeletal Christian Bale as a tormented insomniac wasting away and terrorized by his irreal existence.
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90Psychological suspense at its finest.
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88Anderson gives The Machinist a sickly noirish look that contributes to the creeping horror - but it's the emaciated Bale's spectral presence that leaves the imprint.
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83Bale is totally convincing, if not especially endearing.
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80The Machinist is so brave and visually impressive, it should demand an audience.
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75Director Brad Anderson tightens the screws of suspense, but it's Bale's gripping, beyond-the-call-of-duty performance that holds you in thrall.
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75The director Brad Anderson, working from a screenplay by Scott Kosar, wants to convey a state of mind, and he and Bale do that with disturbing effectiveness.
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A moody psychological thriller with a stunning performance by Christian Bale at its core.
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75Bale is brilliant.
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75Bale gives a near-great performance as a man with all the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia and the film weaves an ingenious psychological web.
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75In the hands of a less talented filmmaker, The Machinist would have felt like a stunt. But Anderson, with a terrific assist from Bale, makes his character's plight achingly physical.
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75The film presents a compelling portrait of mental illness, but looking at Bale may make audiences feel as though they're watching a documentary.
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75A harrowing experience for those to whom this sort of story appeals.
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70Not quite stunning enough to live up to a boldly bleak and unrelenting buildup.
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70An intense, precision-controlled psychological mystery built around a very creepy lead performance by Christian Bale.
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Here his (Bale's) physicality is repellent, yet he carries the occasionally creaky plot of Scott Kosar's unsettling screenplay to a resonant finish.
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67Never gives us the nuts and bolts of mental illness and guilt, just the sight of cooped-up steam escaping from a valve that's about to blow.
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63Turns out to be something entirely different than it initially seemed, and while the conclusion brings everything to a logical close, it also renders the movie less interesting -- a stunt that didn't merit Bale's startling, and dangerous, transformation.
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63Give Anderson credit for at least sustaining a mood. This is the kind of all-or-nothing movie in which a filmmaker probably can't waver from his tone.
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63An hallucinatory mix of the imagined and the real, all revolving around the mystery at the cold heart of the tale.
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60Anderson is a master of detail, from the film's ubiquitous fish motif to the elaborate carnival set piece that unfolds inside the claustrophobic confines of a spook-house ride called "Route 666."
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60It's a result so painfully logical it would make Lynch's hair stand on end.
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60May be an expertly manipulated exercise in psychological horror, but that's all it is. Don't look for the kind of metaphoric weight you'd find in a movie by David Lynch or David Fincher.
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58Although the primary plot line turns out to be a letdown, there are aspects of The Machinist that redeem it. Bale's performance is one; another is the dull, metallic look of the picture.
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50The main, if not only, reason to see The Machinist is for Christian Bale's title performance, and even then you have to be a fan of hardcore martyrdom in the service of craft.
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50In a way, though, it's all Bale's show. Withering down to an alarming 120 pounds, he delivers a deeply obsessed performance that leaves us both fascinated and sickened.
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50Director Brad Anderson (Session 9) is usually really good at humanizing ambiguous characters, and he ultimately succeeds, but he has to fight against Scott Kosar's script.
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42Bale exists all too large under the circumstances, a well-fed actor playing at emaciation for the sake of a fiction about a character whose torment is as unreadable as his vertebrae are countable.
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40Bale gives a remarkable performance in a movie I can recommend to no one, because the sight of him is more distressing than any of the allegedly deep themes of the picture.
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40The Machinist has no meat on its bones, and we've seen it all before.
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38Director Brad Anderson (Session 9) overtly cribs from everyone from Dostoevsky to Kafka.
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30Unrelentingly dreary, and seemingly destined to be remembered, if at all, as that movie Christian Bale lost a full third of his body weight for. It doesn't deserve any better.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 26 out of 31
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Mixed: 1 out of 31
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Negative: 4 out of 31
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