74
Metascore
10 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 90SalonAndrew O'HehirSalonAndrew O'HehirYou either like this kind of ambitious, brave, borderless experiment or you don't, and I think it's absolutely magical and tragic.
- 90The New York TimesStephen HoldenThe New York TimesStephen HoldenLooks and feels like a fever dream about an alternate universe. Suffused with a sense of wonder, it hovers, dancing inside its own ethereal bubble.
- 80Village VoiceVillage VoiceThat it documents rural poverty in the American West without exploiting or sanctifying its subjects would be cause enough for praise. But this doesn't begin to approach what Alma Har'el pulls off with her hybrid documentary knockout Bombay Beach.
- 80EmpireEmpireThe fact that Alma Har'el is still stuck in music video director mode makes for an interesting new breed of documentary.
- More lyrical tone poem than straightforward documentary.
- But it's to little Benny that the film's heart belongs -- an adorable kid who seems to live only half in this world and the rest of the time in his own imagination, Benny's on a regimen of Ritalin and Lithium and other meds that sometimes leave him even dreamier than is his norm.
- 58The A.V. ClubNoel MurrayThe A.V. ClubNoel MurrayThis aestheticizing of troubled lives proves problematic over the long haul.
- 50In an inspired twist, Har'el brings surreal levity to the potentially downer subject by interrupting her elegiac regional portraiture with a series of amateur dance numbers. Still, without dramatic momentum, this fringe-appeal snapshot feels less like a film than a coffee-table photo project come to life.
- 50Slant MagazineAndrew SchenkerSlant MagazineAndrew SchenkerRather than bringing out the symbolic inner lives of the characters, these sequences seem like the intrusion of an aggressive authorial personality on a film whose subject-as well as the fact of Har'el's outsider status-demands that the filmmaker simply sit back and observe.