Critic Reviews
| 75 |
Entertainment Weekly
John August directs it briskly, as a gossip-era "Twilight Zone" of image and reality.
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| 75 |
New York Daily News
It's an intricate, at times incoherent, but often funny and consistently fascinating trio of stories with the same actors in different but related roles.
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| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
Rather than come across as fantastic or dreamlike, the stories have a vivid, hyperreal quality to them.
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| 70 |
Film Threat
Jamie Tipps
This movie is metaphysical fun, and while some elements are predictable, it’s an engaging mystery.
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| 63 |
Premiere
It's an overall heady conceit about image and invention, clever and fun with compelling lead performances -- especially Reynolds, who finally gets to show some chops in a career littered with Van Wilder–grade junk.
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| 63 |
TV Guide
The payoff fizzles, but the buildup is intriguing until it topples under its own weight.
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| 60 |
Variety
The Nines arcs from witty Hollywood insiderdom to a climactic metaphysical leap that may leave many viewers nonplussed. Nonetheless, there's more than enough intelligence, intrigue and performance dazzle to make this an adventuresome gizmo for grownups.
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| 50 |
Salon.com
The movie never fails to be crisply written and cannily delivered, but it's way too steeped in TV-culture inside jokes for its own good, and August's attempts to suffuse the whole thing with ontological or theological meaning are ultimately pretty dumb.
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| 50 |
The New York Times
Think of it as a kind of “Twilight Zone 2007” in which the paranoia endemic to an industry that runs on illusion, hype and extravagant grandiosity comes home to roost.
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| 38 |
New York Post
Wavers uncomfortably between satire and dime-store existentialism on the big screen. It's sort of as if Charlie Kaufman rewrote "The Fountain."
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| 30 |
Austin Chronicle
The Nines is the feature-film-directing debut from screenwriter John August (Go, Big Fish), but it feels much more like some Bizarro World collaboration between Jean-Paul Sartre and Charlie Kaufman, and not in a good way, either.
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| 30 |
Village Voice
Scott Foundas
It's hardly a novel idea, but at least when Kaufman, David Lynch, or Michel Gondry invites us on a tour of his chaotic subconscious, it's a fascinating place to visit. Plunging into August's gray matter is more like a season in vacation hell.
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