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80Thoroughly entertaining and will possibly get you thinking about certain choices you've made in your life.
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80A compelling, exquisitely acted drama about the shock waves emanating from -- and toward -- a single act of almost inexplicable violence.
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63A tale of disaffection, devastation and epiphanies of the catastrophic kind.
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60A complex and often compelling melodrama, at times almost verging on soap opera.
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50I believe it is as cruel and senseless as the killings in "Elephant," but while that film was chillingly objective, this one seems to be on everybody's side. It's a moral muddle.
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50In his thoughtfully paced, well-acted film, Hoge doesn't set out to solve the "why" of Leland's ghastly crime. He's more interested in examining the reason why society needs to create and interpret a reason for horror.
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50The screenplay aims high in terms of humanity and complexity, but director Hoge drains it of energy with listless meanderings that provide more yawns than insights.
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50Hoge's film raises more questions than it answers – that's his point, I think, to get us thinking – and Gosling, who previously played the conflicted Jewish Nazi skinhead in "The Believer," inhabits the role of Leland so fully it's as if the character had killed him as well.
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50The finished film, while competently acted and staged, has missed the high mark Spacey set for it. It's self-important, tedious and ultimately pointless, with absolutely none of the sardonic wit that remains the most memorable feature of "American Beauty."
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50Only Chris Klein, as the lovesick live-in boyfriend of Becky's sister, is given anything like an active emotional arc to play, and he runs with it so beautifully that he steals the movie.
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42The result is a frustrating and disturbing mishmash of vague philosophical noodling, which even the best-chosen cast can't imbue with zip.
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40Fatuous twaddle posing as a REALLY DEEP consideration of what's wrong with our crazy, mixed-up world, Matthew Ryan Hoge's slick but deeply dumb film unfolds in a picture-perfect suburb of Anywheresville, USA.
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40It's poetic, hypnotic and well-performed, but fails to either draw out its characters with conviction or fully draw its audience in.
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40Hoge, who scripted and directed The United States Of Leland, caters to his cast too much. He gives almost every character a way-too-involved subplot, which distracts from the heart of his story.
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40An ambitious and intelligent film probing that chronic contemporary phenomenon, the seemingly senseless crime, but it is ultimately unsatisfying for all its efforts and various pluses.
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40Hoge shows no particular directorial style, bringing a bland, anonymous look to the generic Southern California suburban locations.
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40The characters' undiluted self-interest will seem one-dimensional to all but the worst cynics.
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38There's a reason filmmaking is considered a craft, and Hoge, a former teacher in a juvenile prison, cannot pull off what would be a tricky proposition for a skilled veteran.
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38Absence of motive makes the movie provocative; the explanation renders it irrelevant and defuses any interesting debate the film might have inspired.
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38The United States of Leland has a resonance of "Elephant" without the visual poetry or structural sophistication, or "American Beauty" without the leavening comedy, but it's neither an insightful nor well-made film.
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30The movie's idiotic fascination with the senselessness of its central act is scarily close to a fetish.
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It's flapping its wings so desperately in pursuit of artistic heights that it nosedives directly into the ground. The relentless exertion makes the film a chore to watch.
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30The real question raised by The United States of Leland is not why, but how. How, that is, did so many talented actors find their way to this dreary and derivative study in suburban dysfunction?
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30There's something secondhand about everything here. Hoge (this is his debut) seems to be mimicking the tone and fabric of other, better indie movies.
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25This bomb, which premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival, belongs in the same remainder bin as Spacey's "Pay It Forward," "K-Pax" and "The Life of David Gale."
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25As bad as its title.
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25The United States of Leland is tedious yet infuriating, since its characters, all of whom seem to have emerged from a screenwriter's manual, are like exhibits in a thesis meant to indict the middle class for the crime of its collective dysfunction.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 14
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Mixed: 1 out of 14
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Negative: 4 out of 14
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MiguelG.3
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HollyC.5
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LarryJ8