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100The sly and subtle Minus Man is a wicked little sidewinder of a black comedy.
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90Eerie, quietly compelling... a fresh and mesmerizing experience...such an unsettling experience you find yourself still taking it all in well after the lights have gone up.
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90The kind of muted, anything-but-obvious psychological thriller Hitchcock would have loved.
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80A potent thriller that grows in intensity as the audience realizes that the character it likes most is most likely a nut job.
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75Low-key, understated style. The suspense beats away underneath.
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75Excellent acting and a finely tuned screenplay spark this genuinely offbeat melodrama.
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75Fancher's placid, eerily subdued first directorial feature.
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75With no climactic showdown and no comforting revelation of motive or reassuring psychoanalytic diagnosis, the nerve-rattling potential of this sly, paranoia-inducing story may sink in only later.
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70Less interesting for what it has to say about evil -- namely, that it's banal/unknowable/random/everywhere -- than for the microsurgical procedures it performs on genre conventions and expectations.
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70Disarming-misfit story, which combines elements of a road movie, romance, small-town idyll, and police procedural.
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63It's a drab, familiar story with no oomph (and less humor than you'd think), and it's inconsistent.
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63Its mood of ennui and dread will haunt long after its title character's beaming grin has faded.
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60A film without attitude or mystery...an exquisitely executed, and exquisitely banal, treatise on the banality of evil.
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60Doesn't show us much of anything we haven't seen better already.
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60Fancher seems uninterested in developing real suspense, or incapable of it, at least until the end, when there's plenty of it, but artificially imposed.
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58The film ultimately has no contrast and we can't figure out whom to like or dislike.
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50Minimalism be damned; even a postmodern noir needs more than Minus Man gives us. So do the actors.
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50There are absolutely no psychological insights into sick minds in The Minus Man, a poky, opaque drama with a good cast and not much going on upstairs.
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50There is no tension here. Actually, The Minus Man is minus a lot - intensity, a point of view, maybe even a point - and that equals an unsatisfying film.
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50The banality of faceless evil isn't actually all that compelling on the hoof; the film's more interesting as a curiosity than as a film.
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50Takes such pains to avoid narrative and verbal cliches and anything that could remotely be construed as sentimental or romantic that it feels curiously flat.
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38A slow, self-consciously low-key, very dull film that strains for eeriness with long silences and affectless performances.
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30The most lackadaisical thriller I've ever seen, overly infatuated with not only the inexplicability of random evil, but also its mundanity.
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30If you're dragged to the theater to be someone's not-dumb date, pack a crossword and a light pen. It'll be the only puzzle worth solving.
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25A half-baked disappointment...never flies, never comes close to meeting its own expectations.
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10Really a big fat zero. Hampton Fancher has done the unthinkable -- he's made a boring serial killer movie.