| 80 |
Rolling Stone
In a summer of clones, Harvard Man is something rare and riveting: a wild ride that relies on more than special effects.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Adams sparkles with quick-mindedness and verbal agility. This is a worthy and underused talent.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
The first half of this freewheeling comedy-drama finds Toback at his imaginative best. The second half sinks into silliness.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Sun-Times
How can one man juggle two women, possible expulsion, Mafia baseball bats and the meaning of life, while on acid? This is the kind of question only a Toback film thinks to ask, let alone answer.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Tribune
Toback's films deliver a lot of bang for the buck. He's one of the few serious and original directors who can mix group sex and talk of existentialism; a fast-paced basketball sequence cut with scenes of Mafia members plotting a hit; and an in-class philosophy lecture stylishly edited with Alan's memories of a contradictory in-bed discussion.
|
| 70 |
LA Weekly
As with most of Toback's films, there are Big Ideas being bandied about that never quite coalesce, a failing that, this time at least, mirrors his hero's own hyped-out search for meaning.
|
| 70 |
Variety
Lisa Nesselson
Wildly uneven yet perversely coherent ode to the lure of sexual and chemical experimentation, the precariousness of sanity and the sheer suggestible power of paranoia.
|
| 70 |
The New York Times
Mr. Toback uses his improbable, conventional story as the trelliswork for a series of wild and florid riffs about sex, ethics and the delirium of renegade moviemaking.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Reader
Bill Stamets
The film suffers from clunky smart-aleck dialogue and an overabundance of jump cuts and crane shots, and despite its libertine air, Toback repeatedly cautions that acid is a fast track to insanity, especially in combination with Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
Sillier than it is clever, and Toback's self-indulgence is tiresome. He's a genuine auteur, all right, but his life and the funky tastes that inspire him are just not as interesting as he thinks they are.
|
| 50 |
Los Angeles Times
A fast and clever con-gone-wrong comedy that reflects the writer-director's characteristic blend of the intellectual and the criminal. But it lacks anyone to care about--even the repellent characters are less than fascinating--and the result is a crisply made movie that is no more than mildly amusing.
|
| 50 |
New Times (L.A.)
Toback has taken a distinctly '60s-ish personal experience and done his best to transplant it into the current, vastly different, cultural milieu. Harvard Man is a semi-throwback, a reminiscence without nostalgia or sentimentality.
|
| 42 |
Entertainment Weekly
A characteristically engorged and sloppy coming-of-age movie from the filmmaker (''Harvard '66'') who, in his body of work, indulges his fantasies as fetishistically as other men finger their cigars.
|
| 40 |
TV Guide
The story's self-conscious seaminess cries out for the ministrations of a filmmaker like direct-to-video auteur Gregory Hippolyte.
|
| 40 |
Salon.com
Sure, sex and drugs can take you to a higher plane. But not if a movie crushes your will to live first.
|
| 40 |
Village Voice
Obsessives can be seductive, and Toback is interesting for the same reasons his films are often unendurable: He's not an artist so much as a giant pop-cult testicle pumping absurd energy in a rampaging, self-justifying gout.
|
| 30 |
Wall Street Journal
There's no transcending a prosaic plot and several flat performances.
|
| 30 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Channels Toback in his purest form, which will probably be a treat for auteurists and a headache for just about everyone else.
|
| 25 |
New York Post
Psst! Wanna vicariously experience a consciousness-raising LSD trip and watch Sarah Michelle Gellar star in some explicit sex scenes?
|
| 10 |
Film Threat
An astonishing mess.
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