Metacritic Film

Slipstream

Starring Anthony Hopkins, Christian Slater, Jeffrey Tambor, John Turturro, Camryn Manheim, Fionnula Flanagan, and Michael Clarke Duncan

MPAA RATING: R for language and some violent images

Strand Releasing
Comedy  |  Drama  |  Fantasy  |  Sci-fi
96 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters October 26, 2007

This project attracted a renowned ensemble cast and crew. It also boasted an outstanding combined total of more than 70 esteemed awards and accolades, as well as over 200 nominations. Pushing the boundaries between fiction and fantasy, Slipstream is about the implosion of a man's mind. The film unfolds in a dreamlike, nonlinear, stream-of-consciousness style of storytelling with a surreal tale of one man's journey. Felix Bonhoeffer (Hopkins) is an actor/screenwriter who has lived his life in two states of existence: reality and his own interior world. While working on a murder-mystery screenplay, Felix becomes baffled as his characters start appearing in his life and his life starts slipping into his characters. Unaware that his brain is on the verge of implosion, Bonhoeffer is thrown into a vortex where his dreams, time, and reality collide. As Felix enters an increasingly whirling slipstream, he soon discovers that life is random and fortune is sightless. (Strand Releasing)

WRITTEN BY
Anthony Hopkins

DIRECTED BY
Anthony Hopkins

Overall Metascore

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

47 / 100

Critic Reviews

75 Chicago Sun-Times
Now is Slipstream worth seeing? I think so, if you'll actively engage your sympathy with Hopkins' attempt to do something tricky and difficult. If you want to lie back and let the movie come to you, you may be lying there a long time.
70 Film Threat Jamie Tipps
Slipstream is a properly bizarre journey.
70 The Hollywood Reporter
Amusing cinematic buffoonery by a man poking fun at movie conventions and the movie business itself.
63 New York Daily News
Writer, director and star Anthony Hopkins releases his inner muse with Slipstream, and guess who shows up - David Lynch!
50 Los Angeles Times
Taking a cue from David Lynch, Hopkins fractures the narrative from the first frame, but unlike Lynch he doesn't go far enough in establishing a context from which to deviate. If the story fragments we're watching spring from the same mind, in other words, it's not obvious.
50 Variety
Apparently needing to release some private thoughts, musings and images to the world, Anthony Hopkins takes a leap into stunning self-indulgence with his directorial debut, Slipstream.
50 Village Voice Aaron Hillis
Hopkins claims it's a comedy, and perhaps John Turturro's live-action cartoon of a mogul producer suggests so, but what does it all mean? That art can be just as shallow as Hollywood?
50 Salon.com
The film has moments of goofy delight, some pseudo-David Lynch spookery and a couple of comic supporting turns.
50 Chicago Tribune Sid Smith
Bold, experimental, off-the-wall kicky and utterly exasperating.
50 TV Guide
If not exactly dull, Hopkins' stream-of-consciousness rant is nonetheless self-indulgent and crammed with bits of business that never add up to anything much.
50 Chicago Reader
Not so much ill conceived and misdirected as unconceived and undirected, this is folly on a grand scale.
50 The New York Times
For an actor like Mr. Hopkins, disappearing into another character, especially a historical figure, must be a far more unsettling deconstruction of reality than for the casual moviegoer observing the transformation. That is a notion Slipstream might have explored more fruitfully, had it focused its wandering attention span, kept its camera steadier and figured out what it wanted to say.
33 The Onion (A.V. Club)
The result is either one of the most self-indulgent vanity projects in the history of the Hollywood star system, or a rare revealing look at a distinguished actor who usually keeps his real self out of the spotlight.
12 New York Post
At 96 minutes, this vanity/insanity project runs a bit long; five minutes would have been plenty.

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