DVD
Upcoming Release Calendar
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Recent DVD/Video Releases
58
Adam Resurrected
65
Adoration
42
Aliens in the Attic
56
American Violet
44
Answer Man, The
82
Anvil! The Story of Anvil![]()
58
Away We Go
54
Battle for Terra
55
Casi Divas
63
Cheri
83
Drag Me to Hell![]()
76
Every Little Step
70
Fados
26
Filth and Wisdom
80
Food, Inc.
34
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
67
Girlfriend Experience, The
32
I Love You, Beth Cooper
50
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
81
Il Divo![]()
32
Land of the Lost
74
Lemon Tree
43
Love 'N Dancing
64
Lymelife
50
Management
63
Medicine for Melancholy
56
Monsters vs. Aliens
34
My Life in Ruins
48
Not Forgotten
76
Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
50
Nothing Like the Holidays
26
Objective, The
54
Observe and Report
78
O'Horten
42
Orphan
48
Proposal, The
40
Shrink
55
Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, The
35
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
88
Tulpan![]()
66
Unmistaken Child
45
Whatever Works
34
Year One
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Slipstream

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 14 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 2 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Drama | Fantasy | Sci-fi
Written by: Anthony Hopkins
Directed by: Anthony Hopkins
Release Date:
Theatrical: October 26, 2007
DVD: February 26, 2008
Running Time: 96 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for language and some violent images
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Christian Slater, Jeffrey Tambor, John Turturro, Camryn Manheim, Fionnula Flanagan, and Michael Clarke Duncan
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)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
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.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Amusing cinematic buffoonery by a man poking fun at movie conventions and the movie business itself.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Writer, director and star Anthony Hopkins releases his inner muse with Slipstream, and guess who shows up - David Lynch!
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
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.
Read Full Review >Variety Robert Koehler
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.
Read Full Review >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?
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
The film has moments of goofy delight, some pseudo-David Lynch spookery and a couple of comic supporting turns.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Sid Smith
Bold, experimental, off-the-wall kicky and utterly exasperating.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
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.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Not so much ill conceived and misdirected as unconceived and undirected, this is folly on a grand scale.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
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.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
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.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
At 96 minutes, this vanity/insanity project runs a bit long; five minutes would have been plenty.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 3.5 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Curtis S. gave it a0:
This is the first zero rating I've ever given to a movie. What an utter piece of confused noisy trash this film is. Random visual and auditory interference scattered abundantly throughout, after about 15 minutes, I could watch no more. I think it qualifies as "unwatchable." The entire movie, according to others estimations of it on metacritic,com, is a bunch of confusion: real and fictional elements of an older (dying) man as his life flashes before him. This strongly seems like the experimental work of a first year, self-indulgent film student who wanted to bring one of his sleep-dreams to life, with absolutely no consideration for the audience's enjoyment or understanding. I think the relatively high rating of 7, by consumers and pro critics is due to some misplaced allegiance to Anthony Hopkins, (obviously a great actor in other films), who wrote, directed and comatosely "starred" in this embarrassment. Even he called it "a joke" at a screening. Please, Mr. Hopkins, stick to acting, or at least have a story if you decide to give it another go at directing, To sit for an hour and a half only to find out that the unpleasant mish-mash you've just endured is the fractured percepton of a dying man is a complete disappointment. It's like someone had played a cruel trick on you and wasted an hour and a half of your life. Not, funny, Mr. Hopkins.
Chad S. gave it a7:
Five minutes into...hell, let's be honest here; thirty-seven seconds into "Slipstream", I was lost. I had to consult my Oxford Concise English Dictionary to look up the word "slipstream". According to the OED, "slipstream" is defined as "an assisting force regarded as drawing something along with or behind something else." That helps explain the seemingly arbitrary flashbacks that are hurled at the viewer in abundance, in places where no filmmaker has ever placed them before. Then there are the jump cuts, the off-kilter music cues, the lack of continuity, the external noise on the soundtrack, the Russian formalist style of editing, etc., etc., etc. "Slipstream" has the look and feel of a collaboration between Jean-Luc Goddard and David Lynch. It's art film damage. "Slipstream" makes both "Pierrot le fou" and "Mulholland Drive" seem less ardurous to sit through by comparison. Actor-turned-director Anthony Hopkins made a film that no ordinary person would want to sit through. Good for him. Who knew he had it in him to be a confrontational artist? "Slipstream" has the look and feel of a young man's movie. He's 71, folks. But then, in the final act, he shows his age; the funhouse thrill of disorientation wears out; the film's nonsensical presentation starts to make sense; all the looking glasses in the hall of mirrors are cracked except one. Unlike the work of Lynch, in which story particulars are open for debate, "Slipstream", decidedly slips off its French skin and walks around like an American during the home stretch. From dadaism to didacticism; the filmmaker makes the mistake of being too tidy, especially so during the end credits.
