Metacritic Film

Showboy

Starring Lindy Heymann, Adrian Armas, Siegfried Fischbacher, Whoopi Goldberg, Roy Horn, Erich Miller, and Christian Taylor

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Regent Releasing
Comedy
93 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters April 9, 2004

When Christian Taylor, a writer on HBO's wildly popular Six Feet Under, agrees to let a British Television crew follow him for a series about Brits working in Hollywood, he finds that his true calling may be in the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas' Stage and not in the harsh world of Hollywood show business. (Squeak Pictures)

WRITTEN BY
Christian Taylor
Lindy Heymann
Jason Buchtel

DIRECTED BY
Lindy Heymann
Christian Taylor

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

37 / 100

Critic Reviews

70	Los Angeles Times The result is a deliberate conflation of fact and fiction that yields unexpected emotional impact.
60	TV Guide Taylor, while perhaps a little small to become a real Vegas showboy, makes for a very charismatic hero, while Joaquin Baca-Asay's cinematography captures all the glitz and slightly tawdry glamour of the Vegas strip.
50	LA Weekly The film takes on unexpected weight when Christian cops to his intense personal loneliness. That's not the stuff of high comedy, but it's brave and, in these days of rah-rah, everyone's-in-love gay media, rather refreshing.
50	Variety It's a rich idea for a comedy, even if the filmmakers seem timid about making the pic the full-on satire it might have been.
50	The New York Times The lesson of Showboy is how disturbingly easy it is for an audience to trust what it sees when confronted with a film posing as factual documentary.
40	The Hollywood Reporter Unlike such similar efforts as "A Mighty Wind," this would-be satire isn't funny enough to be entertaining, nor is it clever enough to fool us.
20	Village Voice Akiva Gottlieb So amateurish that its awkward Whoopi Goldberg cameo actually adds a touch of class, Showboy is an ill-conceived, often implausible hybrid of fact and fiction.
0	New York Post Lethargically paced, badly edited and shot in hideous digital video.

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