Bartleby

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Mr. Parker has brilliantly updated his source and grasped its essence, composing a sorrowful and hilarious tone poem about alienated labor, or an absurdist workplace sitcom, as if a team of French surrealists had been put in charge of "The Drew Carey Show."

LA Weekly Chuck Wilson

While Parker and co-writer Catherine di Napoli are faithful to Melville’s plotline, they and a fully engaged supporting cast — have made the old boy's characters more quick-witted than any English Lit major would have thought possible.

Slate David Edelstein

The neat thing about Jonathan Parker's modern-day Bartleby (Outsider Pictures) is that it brings out all the vaudeville undercurrents in Melville's dark tale and turns it into a surreal tragi-sitcom for our own era.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

This is a shrewd and effective film from a director who understands how to create and sustain a mood.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The film has been directed by Jonathan Parker; he adapted the Melville story with Catherine DiNapoli. It's his first work, and a promising one. I admire it and yet cannot recommend it, because it overstays its natural running time.

Miami Herald Charles Savage

Though this film can be clumsy, its ambitions are equally -- and admirably -- uncommercial.

Variety Joe Leydon

Although closer in tone to "Office Space" than Herman Melville, Jonathan Parker's absurdist update of Bartleby is surprisingly faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of the "Moby-Dick" author's 1853 novella about an under-achieving Wall Street copy clerk.

TV Guide Ken Fox

It's a testament to both the timelessness and the prescience of Herman Melville's 1853 story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" that it can be so easily updated with so few changes.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

It's a parable as timely today as when it was written. But except for Paymer as the boss who ultimately expresses empathy for Bartleby's pain, the performances are so stylized as to be drained of human emotion.

New Times (L.A.) Luke Y. Thompson

A key problem here is that the film is adapting a short story, and, as such, has to pad it out to feature length -- it still comes in at a scant 82 minutes, about 52 minutes too long.

Empire Nick Dawson

A fable that leaves us unenlightened at the end, it is a curious, worthy failure.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

It's not a bad idea, and it has the right cast and the right look. But, sad to say, it lacks the pace and energy to make it come alive and therefore remains more of a literary conceit than a movie.

Film Threat Ron Wells

Oh, boy. This is not unlike watching one of the movies Jerry Lewis made after that concentration camp/clown epic nearly destroyed his career and his mind.

Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman

Comes across as stiff and uneven.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Does little more than re-create the oppressive feeling of suffocating employment. And why put yourself through that experience without the promise of a paycheck at the other end?

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Parker's film is flat beyond the flatness appropriate to the story; the conflict between Glover and Paymer follows Melville's original so squarely that it quickly begins to feel like they're going through the motions.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

It's no insult to Melville to say that he wrote, in effect, the original ''Dilbert.'' This movie, unfortunately, makes ''Dilbert'' look like Melville.

New York Post Megan Lehmann

There's obviously some philosophical comment on the alienating effects of ho-hum toil buried somewhere in this weird mess, which features an irritating, theremin-heavy score. But can you be bothered stifling a yawn and searching for meaning? I would prefer not to.

Village Voice Jessica Winter

The loud, musty production design -- steeped in lime greens and tangerine oranges -- smells of recirculated air and enervated ambition, but unfortunately, so does the movie itself.