| 100 |
Boston Globe
The sly and subtle Minus Man is a wicked little sidewinder of a black comedy.
|
| 90 |
Variety
Glen Lovell
The kind of muted, anything-but-obvious psychological thriller Hitchcock would have loved.
|
| 90 |
Los Angeles Times
Eerie, 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.
|
| 80 |
Rolling Stone
A potent thriller that grows in intensity as the audience realizes that the character it likes most is most likely a nut job.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Low-key, understated style. The suspense beats away underneath.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Examiner
Fancher's placid, eerily subdued first directorial feature.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
Excellent acting and a finely tuned screenplay spark this genuinely offbeat melodrama.
|
| 75 |
Entertainment Weekly
With 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.
|
| 70 |
Chicago Reader
Disarming-misfit story, which combines elements of a road movie, romance, small-town idyll, and police procedural.
|
| 70 |
Village Voice
Less 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.
|
| 63 |
Mr. Showbiz
It's a drab, familiar story with no oomph (and less humor than you'd think), and it's inconsistent.
|
| 63 |
Baltimore Sun
Its mood of ennui and dread will haunt long after its title character's beaming grin has faded.
|
| 60 |
LA Weekly
A film without attitude or mystery...an exquisitely executed, and exquisitely banal, treatise on the banality of evil.
|
| 60 |
Film.com
Fancher seems uninterested in developing real suspense, or incapable of it, at least until the end, when there's plenty of it, but artificially imposed.
|
| 60 |
Dallas Observer
Doesn't show us much of anything we haven't seen better already.
|
| 58 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The film ultimately has no contrast and we can't figure out whom to like or dislike.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
There 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.
|
| 50 |
TV Guide
The 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.
|
| 50 |
The New York Times
Takes such pains to avoid narrative and verbal cliches and anything that could remotely be construed as sentimental or romantic that it feels curiously flat.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
There 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.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Tribune
Minimalism be damned; even a postmodern noir needs more than Minus Man gives us. So do the actors.
|
| 38 |
New York Post
A slow, self-consciously low-key, very dull film that strains for eeriness with long silences and affectless performances.
|
| 30 |
Salon.com
Jeff Stark
If 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.
|
| 30 |
Austin Chronicle
The most lackadaisical thriller I've ever seen, overly infatuated with not only the inexplicability of random evil, but also its mundanity.
|
| 25 |
San Francisco Chronicle
A half-baked disappointment...never flies, never comes close to meeting its own expectations.
|
| 10 |
TNT RoughCut
Really a big fat zero. Hampton Fancher has done the unthinkable -- he's made a boring serial killer movie.
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