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IGBY GOES DOWN
"A movie that opens with two teens killing
their mother had better know what it's doing. And this one does.
Writer and director Burr Steers has crafted an ironic, literary
tone whose closest antecedent is 'The Royal Tenenbaums,' another
movie where family dysfunction is so severe, it morphs into theater
of the absurd...The movie is an actors' paradise, and absolutely
no one disappoints. Culkin proves once again that he is the real
actor of the Culkin brood." --
Jami Bernard,
The New York Daily News
"...poisonously funny and unstintingly furious gem, a little indie-style
production that succeeds not because it breaks new ground but because
it displays such nimble footing around a familiarly rocky coming-of-age
landscape...[Burr Steers] has given Kieran Culkin the role of a young
lifetime as Igby, unleashing a naked performance of such natural precision
and authority that one wonders if all the ash of backstage Culkin
family dramas we've read about over the years had to be compacted
to produce such a diamond-sharp achievement...'Igby Goes Down' only
gets weirder and meaner and darker and sadder as it progresses, which
is amazing since it simultaneously remains funny and horrifying right
up to the end." --Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment
Weekly
"Written and directed by Burr Steers, 'Igby' tries to compensate for
having an unoriginal thesis (News flash! Adults are craven fools and
clueless idiots) by presenting a character dripping with self-conscious
attitude, someone we're supposed to cleave to and sympathize with
because he's discovered that (News flash, No. 2!) there's hypocrisy
out there in the real world...No situation in his young life, no matter
how dire, leaves him without a glib, smarty-pants rejoinder. In whatever
time he's got left over from being an Oscar Wilde wannabe, Igby steals
money and drugs, lies almost pathologically and looks hurt whenever
anyone has the temerity to question his unswervingly juvenile behavior...Writer-director
Steers has chosen to overload 'Igby' with phony archness and forced
black humor, making it not the place to look for satisfying acting...Igby's
idea of the good life is killing time, and there are few worse ways
to do it than with the film that bears his name." --Kenneth
Turan, The Los Angeles Times
"'Igby Goes Down' is the remarkably assured directorial and screenwriting
debut of Burr Steers...In a bracing turnabout from the wide-eyed saints
with whom she is identified, Ms. Sarandon gives this monster a gleefully
comic edge...Even though the movie drifts uneasily between satire
and realism, and its visions of military school and bohemia feel secondhand,
it maintains a ruthless emotional honesty. Ultimately, it gets at
something that no other recent American movie has captured quite so
acutely: a resentful, lurking disappointment in the good life." --Stephen
Holden, The New York Times
"If 'Igby' doesn't entirely satisfy, it's because it's a little too
in love with its WASP milieu, and because its subject--the inchoate
rebellion of a preppy teen--feels insubstantial... the preppy rebel
Igby doesn't have that much to be unhappy about, and doesn't take
his rebellion anywhere truly dangerous...Culkin is superb--he makes
you forget that Igby is a spoiled brat who actually deserves the beating
he gets...But the real triumphs in 'Igby' come from [Ryan] Philippe,
who makes Oliver far more interesting than the character's lines would
suggest, and Sarandon, who couldn't be better as a cruel but weirdly
likable WASP matron." --Jonathan Foreman,
The New York Post
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