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AUTO FOCUS
"In 'Auto Focus,' the strangely wonderful and
weirdly touching new film from Paul Schrader, the comedy and the
tragedy keep getting mixed up...Schrader has his own ideas on what
made Crane run, and it's the filmmaker's sharp, at times startlingly
funny read on the actor as both a figure of absurdity and tragedy
that lifts 'Auto Focus' out of the gutter of tabloid biography...Kinnear
is indispensable to the film's quicksilver changes. The performance
is an amazing conjuring trick, not only technically but because
Crane fundamentally comes across as a cipher." --Manohla
Dargis, The Los Angeles Times
"'Auto Focus' gets to you like a low-grade fever, a malaise with
no known antidote. When it was over, I wasn't sure if I needed a
drink, a shower or a lifelong vow of chastity...this is the existential
tragedy of a shallow man, who is less a person in his own right
than the illustration of a condition....There is plenty of nudity
in 'Auto Focus,' but you can always glimpse the abyss behind the
undulating bodies, and the director leads you from easy titillation
to suffocating dread, pausing only briefly and cautiously to consider
the possibility of pleasure." --A.O.
Scott, The New York Times
" 'Auto Focus' certainly holds one's attention, but it's a strange
and grim experience, ice-cold and borderline pointless...In the
end, Crane and Carpenter are astonishingly uninteresting...some
of Schrader's scenes cast a gruesome pall--say, the episode of the
two men masturbating side by side as they watch the tapes together.
Are we meant to feel pity? To laugh? The friendship is ludicrous
without being funny." --David
Denby, The New Yorker
"'Auto Focus' is a deep portrait of a shallow man, lonely and empty,
going through the motions of having a good time...There is no lust
or passion in this film, only mechanical courtship followed by desultory
sex...Greg Kinnear gives a creepy, brilliant performance as a man
lacking in all insight." --Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"Kinnear, a revelation, drops his bright smile and goes to seed
before our eyes, in another strikingly precise performance from
one of Hollywood's most unexpectedly flexible actors...The direction
is merciless, determined, grim, and inventive...Sex is joyless and
killing in 'Auto Focus,' but within the scope of Schrader's zoom
lens, the performances are vividly alive. Dafoe, whose rangy, vaguely
menacing dramatic style complements the director's interests, does
the hard work of creating a character whose lack of definition extends
to his sexual orientation." --Lisa Schwarzbaum,
Entertainment Weekly
"'Auto Focus,' Schrader's strongest movie since 'Affliction,' is
another meditation on American masculinity powerfully told with
great wit and style." --Lou Lumenick,
The New York Post
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