| 88 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Filled with bleak, beautiful Hopperesque tableaus and strange characters whose lives intersect.
|
| 80 |
Washington Post
It's a movie full of quietly assured flourishes: elegant camera compositions, wonderful uses of silence and an entertainingly eclectic cast, including Peggy Lipton as a sensitive bartender.
|
| 78 |
Austin Chronicle
Its doomed portrait of guileless dreamers may be found lacking in plot activity and empathetic characters. But for anyone interested in a movie that wipes clean the grungy patina of self-delusionment, Jackpot hits solid pay dirt.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
Gries and Morris act up a storm as the optimistically named Sunny Holiday and his long-suffering manager.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Tribune
The acting is primo and the cinematography, on high-definition video by the gifted M. David Mullen, is striking.
|
| 70 |
Chicago Reader
Potential irony is everywhere in this movie's subtly surreal situations and candy-colored imagery.
|
| 63 |
Boston Globe
Bummer theater.
|
| 60 |
Mr. Showbiz
The more we realize that we're stuck in the company of a totally relentless loser, the drearier the entire experience becomes.
|
| 58 |
Entertainment Weekly
It's as self consciously arty and fragmented as ''Twin Falls'' was controlled and organically built.
|
| 50 |
New York Post
Barely enough chuckles to keep from running out of gas. Yet it's the sharpest-looking movie shot so far on digital video, outdistancing even "The Anniversary Party."
|
| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Carla Meyer
The filmmakers throw in an extended flatulence routine and enough graphic references to female anatomy to make "The Vagina Monologues" blush.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
Claudia Plig
Essentially a one-gag film.
|
| 50 |
Miami Herald
Connie Ogle
Jackpot ends up a lot like Sunny's singing: pointless and more than a little flat.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Sun-Times
In its mastery of its moments, Jackpot has charm, humor and poignancy. What it lacks is necessity. There's a sense in which we're always waiting for it to kick in.
|
| 40 |
Los Angeles Times
Jackpot has much that is sweet and funny, but it is not overly original--and it is overly long and not as coherent as it might be.
|
| 40 |
Variety
Ken Eisner
A candidate for quiet cult status.
|
| 40 |
New Times (L.A.)
Where "Twin Falls" was slow, brooding and haunting in a manner that fit the subject matter -- the imminent death of one of the principal characters -- Jackpot is just slow and uneventful, like a cross-country Greyhound bus trip that never stops.
|
| 40 |
The New York Times
The movie is smart in small ways, yet an underachiever in big ones -- but it will probably play very well on television. On the big screen, it's distended and diffuse.
|
| 40 |
TV Guide
This dogged journey of self-delusion is interrupted periodically by snippets of footage...that promise a dark revelation that would give an edge to the otherwise tedious goings-on but, sadly, never materializes.
|
| 38 |
New York Daily News
Shows that there's a limit to how much mileage one can get from offbeat, creepy and symbiotic.
|
| 33 |
Portland Oregonian
A very depressing movie.
|
| 30 |
LA Weekly
The mood is hermetic to the point of claustrophobia, embellished with a sense of everyday surrealism indebted to David Lynch.
|
| 30 |
Village Voice
Michael and Mark Polish's debut feature, "Twin Falls, Idaho," was a cloying oddball love story involving adult male Siamese twins; their follow-up, Jackpot, is another piece of whimsical Americana.
|
| 30 |
Washington Post
Nobody hits the jackpot here, certainly not filmmakers Michael and Mark Polish, whose audacious, empathic first film, "Twin Falls Idaho," showed such promise.
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