Wicker Park

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

It would be tempting to say that fractured time sequences in movies have become a cliché, except that Wicker Park makes your brain spin in surprising and pleasurable ways.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Diane Kruger, whose Lisa is subjected to logical whiplash by the plot, always seems to know when it is and how she should feel. Now that's acting.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

The weirdly exhilarating thing about Wicker Park is the reckless abandon with which it embraces the convenience of coincidence, and then the extreme measures it takes to reassure the audience that it's not a movie about coincidence at all.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

As the movie approached the end credits, I cared about what happened to these characters, and that made the coincidences and occasional missteps forgivable.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The film is stylish, the compromising elements that usually junk up a Hollywood "date movie" are nowhere to be seen, the ensemble of supporting actors is strong and, despite a certain woodenness, Hartnett is appealing and mostly very believable.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

This is a smart movie, full of astonishing reverses and switchbacks, and it adroitly walks the thin line between too clever by half and not clever enough by three-quarters.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Movies that are entertainingly nuts don't come around very often, and when they do they need to be given their due.

Empire Alan Morrison

Aside from Rose Byrne's complex performance, there's nothing here that improves upon the original.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

There are some striking visuals and Hartnett is a magnetic presence.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

If plot were oats, Wicker Park would choke a horse.

Variety Scott Foundas

All of this was more enjoyable when Bellucci, Cassel and Bohringer were the stars. Hartnett is overly methodical here as Matthew, and Kruger, as in "Troy," is beautiful but lacking in dramatic intensity.

Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell

One too many scenes with Hartnett's genuinely unpleasant doofus drain away any investment in a film that's suddenly become an elaborate farce without jokes.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

To work, it has to make us feel crazy with love, like "Vertigo" did. Instead, it often just makes us feel crazy for believing any of it.

The New York Times Dave Kehr

The French original was a clever Hitchcock homage with a murder at its center. For reasons unknown, the murder plot has been dropped from the remake (though a few confusing traces of it remain), which leaves Wicker Park without much real urgency to drive its extremely contrived plot.

Village Voice Jessica Winter

Dippy romantic thriller.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

This American version can't hold a candle to its French counterpart, which was deeply, eerily resonant where this is only frustrating, a Rubik's cube, minus its colorful signage.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Instead of building toward a grand romantic climax, it just gets sillier before exploding into a torrent of unintended laughs.

LA Weekly Chuck Wilson

In the end it doesn't lead to much beyond weepy melodrama. Still, McGuigan draws committed performances from a talented cast.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

You have to applaud for sheer folly. This doesn't just reprise another film. It reprises a French film.

Premiere Aaron Hillis

What begins as a pleasantly utilitarian thriller gradually decays into a mediocre suspense drama and ends as an irritatingly feeble love story.

New York Post Megan Lehmann

One of the silliest, most sieve-like screenplays of the year.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Structure overwhelms everything, but it's not as if Wicker Park has nothing to say. It's full of ugly truths about emotional frailty, and implies that stalking is a bad thing only when you're not charming enough about it.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

An elegant tale of romantic obsession weighed down by a needlessly convoluted plot that yields far more confusion than psychological suspense.

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

May have been adapted the 1996 French film "L'Appartement," but pretty much all evidence of what was once an engaging psychodrama has been lost in the translation.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Takes plenty of twists and turns, each so implausible and silly that you have no interest whatsoever in finding out what the next one will be. The director, Paul McGuigan, is fond of fancy split-screen effects and stylish, snappy cutting, but he can't tell a story to save his life.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

A convoluted exercise in shifting perspectives and fractured storytelling.

Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson

If Alfred Hitchcock were retarded, lobotomized, and freshly dug up, he might possibly c--- out a movie like this one.

San Francisco Chronicle Carla Meyer

The studio behind Wicker Park bills it as a "romantic thriller.'' But it's actually an example of an even more unusual subgenre: the dumb, suspense- free and undersexed stalker drama.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Emotionally stultifying and brain-dead.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

The whole incoherent mess is sort of like a downbeat Gap ad, only longer and a lot more boring.

Philadelphia Inquirer David Hiltbrand

A dementedly artificial and artsy film, a headache-inducing jumble of fractured narrative, flashbacks within flashbacks, and shifting perspectives.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

A limp and exceedingly uninvolving melodrama.

Wall Street Journal Joanne Kaufman

Built on such a goofy premise that your average soap-opera scriptwriter would laugh it out of a story meeting.

Film Threat Kevin Carr

The characters’ actions here are goofy, immature, unsettling and at times downright silly.