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ONE HOUR PHOTO
"Robin Williams, following the spare lead
of director Mark Romanek (the video whiz bringing a striking style
to the film), gives a performance that is riveting in its recessiveness
and, as a consequence, truly, deeply scary...Sadly, Romanek's script
settles for facile psychological profiling in the final third of
the film, reducing a complex character to a trite case history of
abuse and dysfunction." --
Peter Travers, Rolling
Stone
"Williams brings a real working-class ethos to the Method, and is
so good here it's almost painful to watch. Oddly, when he's playing
serious roles, he tends to trust the audiences more than when he's
doing comic work. He's not sweating to ingratiate himself through
the damp excesses that can mark some of his other work." -- Elvis
Mitchell, The New York Times
"'One Hour Photo' is an art-house horror movie, and like most art-house
versions of genre films, all the vitality and juice of genre conventions
have been sucked right out...It's a stalker flick where things like
empathy or suspense or horror have not been allowed to disturb the
pristine achievement of the surface." --Charles
Taylor, Salon.com
"Williams' Sy is so fascinating and pitiless that the actor's performance
overrides the director's penchant for fancy-video moments...Dark,
grim, unsympathetic roles like this one and the crafty murder suspect
he played in 'Insomnia' are proving to be the very identity-and-career-revitalizer
the protean Williams misplaced during his dismally sappy 'Bicentennial
Man'/'Patch Adams' movie years...In 'One Hour Photo,'' his is a snapshot
of human complexity worth framing." --Lisa
Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
"Williams tops his recent villainous turns in the comedy 'Death to
Smoochy' and thriller 'Insomnia' as Sy Parrish, the kindly psychotic
stalker...'One Hour Photo' is modeled on 'Taxi Driver,' but as carefully
repressed as Williams is, the full flowering of Sy's obsession lacks
the scary abandon that Robert De Niro brought to Travis Bickle. Since
his pathology is insufficiently motivated, Sy ultimately feels more
like a presence than a character." --J.
Hoberman, The Village Voice
"Of his recent against-type roles, Williams' performance in this smart,
arty little indie is by far the creepiest...the visually oriented
writer-director Mark Romanek is not out to make a slasher film. He
cares for Sy and miraculously manages to separate this nebbish from
the rest of the wacko pack of screen perverts...you wind up feeling
for him..." --Jami Bernard, The
New York Daily News |
