Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a noble failure of a film that's worth a lot more than many of the safer if more achieved works premiering beside it at Sundance 2009.
3 Comments
01/28/09
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)
41
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:29
Fresh:12
Rotten:17
Average Rating:5.1/10
Consensus: Ambitious but uneven, John Krasinski's adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men tries hard but doesn't match the depth of the book.
Synopsis: Based on the book by David Foster Wallace, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN is a darkly funny and disturbing exploration of men and their complex relationships with women. Sara Quinn is... [More]
Starring: Julianne Nicholson, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, Josh Charles
Director: John Krasinski
Reviews for Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Too awkward, disjointed and bland while lacking dramatic momentum and true insight.
09/27/09
Fails for all the reasons you'd expect it to fail.
02/25/09
Feels like 25 very brief stage plays jammed together -- maybe five of which are worth sitting through.
02/02/09
Tthough this experiment doesn’t quite succeed, there’s enough intelligence and insight in this movie to make it worth the attempt.
09/28/09
Brief Interviews is interesting in pieces, but overwhelming in its totality.
09/21/09
Krasinski stitches these raw blasts of the subconscious with interludes that exude a pleasing, Woody Allen-esque tone, all fall colors and potent theorizing over white wine
09/24/09
Whatever it was about Hideous Men that so deeply affected Krasinski the college student has been lost in translation.
09/23/09
It's an undeniably ambitious, if uneven, effort. Some of Krasinski's directorial flourishes are inspired, such as Christopher Meloni's imaginative re-telling (and offbeat re-enacting) about a woman he met as she stood crying at the airport.
09/25/09
Top CriticJohn Krasinski’s adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s ... Brief Interviews With Hideous Men works only in spurts, but when it does, it’s enough to remind us how much deeper our dramatists could drill -- and of the magnitude of Wallace’s loss.
09/21/09
The question is, could someone turn these full-frontal-dudity snapshots into a satisfying, cohesive movie? Answer: no, but not for lack of trying.
09/23/09
Will surely allow you to see John Krasinski in a different light, both as a filmmaker and as a dramatic actor.
09/22/09
Actor John Krasinski deserves credit for having the ambition to adapt material as difficult as David Foster Wallace's short stories.
09/25/09
Sometimes humorous, sometimes repulsive, never insightful, the movie comes off like the work of an overeager college student.
09/24/09
The place where consciousness runs into itself is where this author reigned supreme, and Krasinski brings Wallace’s concentric, self-aware ironies to the screen.
11/05/09
The Penis Monologues!
09/25/09
Krasinski re-creates the interviews using Wallace’s original, but this isn’t exactly a letter-of-the-law adaptation -- he tightens the interviews and defangs some of the language.
11/13/09
Everyone speaks in the sweatily polysyllabic, Look-at-This-Writing-I'm-Doing tone that makes a page of Wallace pass like an hour on the treadmill, and the men are dopes or creeps.
09/25/09
The most impressive thing about Krasinski's direction is his self-assured ability to know when it's time to mix in visual elements, and when it's best to simply point a camera at a good storyteller and let the actor speak.
08/03/09
The movie provides more questions than answers.
10/31/09
Latest News for Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
September 24, 2009:
Critics Consensus: Surrogates Is A Passable Thriller
This week at the movies, we've got robot clones (Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell), artistic-minded freshmen (Fame, starring Kelsey Grammer and Megan... More...
September 13, 2009:
Trailer & Poster review 
More...
What’s Hot On RT
Other News
Fresh Links
Featured
40 Best Films of the 2000s
Last week, Moviefone offered us their worst films of the 2000s. Now see their 40 best!
Competitions
Win Funny People on DVD
We're giving away copies of Judd Apatow's latest.
RSS Feeds