| 75 |
New York Post
V.A. Musetto
A satirical blast at America's gun culture. But it's so entertaining that even a die-hard NRA member might be impressed.
|
| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
Kevin Thomas
By the time this astute and entirely distinctive film is over, the folly of America's love affair with guns, past and present, is laid bare with the same inescapable force with which Gregg Araki exposed the horror of child molestation in "Mysterious Skin," a similarly poetic and deceptively affectless film.
|
| 63 |
TV Guide
Ken Fox
Lars Von Trier's silly script about a group of pistol packing misfits gets better treatment than it deserves, thanks to a fine young cast and the game direction of Thomas Vinterberg.
|
| 60 |
The Hollywood Reporter
James Greenberg
Part parable, part wild west shoot-out, yet totally original, Dear Wendy is a powerful indictment of American gun culture.
|
| 58 |
Portland Oregonian
Marc Mohan
When you have to ask yourself whether this parable is intended as comedic satire or stone-cold-serious moralizing, that's a big sign that you're watching a misfire.
|
| 50 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
Surreal, vaguely amusing, European-made drama.
|
| 50 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Michael Posner
One part satire, two parts allegory, and several parts dreary sermon on the pernicious effects of America's gun culture.
|
| 50 |
Time
Richard Corliss
Von Trier has a tendency to go overboard in his denunciations of American violence (Dogville). By contrast, Dear Wendy is a cogent, comprehensive take on the land and the films that obsess him.
|
| 50 |
Film Threat
Jeremy Mathews
The film is challenging and consistently interesting, but also trite and overbearing to the extent that it damages its message.
|
| 50 |
LA Weekly
Scott Foundas
Starts out as an inspired test case for the continued necessity of the Second Amendment, and only near the end does it lose some of its tightly concentrated focus.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
Claudia Puig
It may sound like a Peter Pan spinoff, and Dear Wendy does involve lost boys in a stagey setting, but the film is closer to "A Clockwork Orange" than a tale of lasting youth.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
Dear Wendy is absurd to the point of comic parody. Bloody as it is, it has no access to viewers' emotions, and its message - play with fire and you get burned - is too obvious to be provocative.
|
| 50 |
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
Taking wobbly aim at our country's complicated love affair with guns, the movie's the very definition of a cheap shot.
|
| 40 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Keith Phipps
Its mad rush to offer shallow takes on every Big American Issue would be offensive if it weren't so misguided. It's almost cute the way Dear Wendy thinks it knows what it's talking about and then just keeps going and going long after it's stopped making sense.
|
| 38 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
A tedious exercise in style, intended as a meditation on guns and violence in America but more of a meditation on itself, the kind of meditation that invites the mind to stray.
|
| 30 |
Variety
Todd McCarthy
Well made but unlikable and dramatically absurd picture.
|
| 30 |
Village Voice
Jessica Winter
Especially in the climactic, clumsily staged gunfight, the prevailing mode is wide-eyed idiocy--which might be the point, since von Trier's satirical target is the hypocrisy of (news flash!) America's eagerness to enforce stability and security with all guns blazing.
|
| 30 |
Salon.com
Andrew O'Hehir
It's not merely that Dear Wendy was shot on Danish and German locations that don't look quite right; it's that almost every decision made by the production designers is wrong, or at least discordant.
|
| 30 |
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
The protracted shoot-out at the end of Dear Wendy is even more pornographic than the moment when a female member of the Dandies exposes her breasts. The audience is clearly expected to enjoy the bloodbath even while it disapproves.
|
| 25 |
Chicago Tribune
Michael Phillips
It's a long slog, not because what the film says is provocative but because the technique is as slack as the writing.
|
| 20 |
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
It's a diatribe from beginning to end.
|
| 20 |
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
The movie's smugness is insufferable.
|
| 10 |
Dallas Observer
Staff (Not credited)
Is there anything more tedious than the guy who complains and complains about something he knows nothing about? Danish cinema auteur Lars von Trier has never been to the United States because he's afraid of flying, yet he seems determined to keep making movies about how horrible this country is.
|
| 10 |
The New York Times
Dana Stevens
The story is laughably incoherent, which would be less bothersome if the movie were not also so unremittingly pretentious.
|
| 0 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Ruthe Stein
Annoyingly simplistic.
|
