Delirious.

"With Delirious, Tom DiCillo puts our national obsession with fame under the magnifying glass, and what he spies is a bunch of people in desperate need of attention, approval, and friendship," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "Not found, however, is a humorous means of exposing and examining this unhealthy fixation on Access Hollywood-era celebrity promotion."

"DiCillo just doesn't have the feeling for, rancor towards, love of, or even understanding of contemporary pop to make a movie about it - nothing in here goes any deeper than what anybody could glean from an afternoon spent in front of E!," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "Because it's a 'scrappy' indie, it'll get the attendance gold star from the usual press who congratulate low-budget filmmakers just for showing up, but really, that sort of approbation isn't doing anybody any good."

Updated through 8/18.

"Some of the plot turns don't quite make sense, but this is still a strong, bitter movie about a milieu that the director intimately understands," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "The movie is exhilarating in a way that only hard-won knowledge of the world can be."

"Can a director be too independent for independent film?" asks John Anderson in the New York Times. "In an arena increasingly seen as an annex of the major studios and where one of Hollywood's contributions has been the acceptance of compromise, the career of the writer and director Tom DiCillo would suggest it's true."

Earlier: "Sundance. Steve Buscemi x 2."

Updates: "Sometimes I feel like I'm on an alien planet," DiCillo tells Aaron Hillis at IFC News. "The only thing I can fall back on, with this movie in particular, is that people really respond to its emotional resonance, and that's assuring to me. It makes me feel like I'm not alone and that there are people out there who recognize it's the human element that matters."

Also, Matt Singer: "DiCillo's movie is stridently anti celebrity culture but it's a bit too broad... The 'shocking' twist that kicks off the third act is certainly unexpected, but it's also totally unbelievable."

Update, 8/14: "Tom DiCillo's Delirious is a mild Midnight Cowboy, a minor King of Comedy, and mainly a vehicle for Steve Buscemi as a lower Manhattan–based paparazzo," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "[I]t's Buscemi who imbues the movie with a scabrous pathos that is scarcely mitigated by the final flash-bulb white-out."

Updates, 8/15: "Mr DiCillo's disgust with this voracious culture is palpable throughout a movie in which there is no glamour to be found," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Even though he reserves a spoonful of honey to make this bitter medicine go down, you leave the movie feeling as though you have gazed into a closed circle of hell where everybody feeds off everyone else until there is nothing left."

"Despite its dubious intentions, Delirious features a few nearly redeeming performances, but Buscemi's is not one of them," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "[Michael] Pitt and [Alison] Lohman nearly carry the film between them.... but with Buscemi mugging in front of the lens and DiCillo posing 'provocative' questions from behind it, it's pretty much hopeless."

Updates, 8/16: Susan King talks with DiCillo for the Los Angeles Times.

"Delirious justifies its title, but confuses its perspective," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "[T]he finale has you rooting for the triumph of glamour over sincerity."

"Almost everybody in the film world likes writer-director Tom DiCillo, and that's for good reasons and maybe for bad ones too." Andrew O'Hehir talks with him for Salon.

Updates, 8/18: "[I]s an achingly funny film that is also a little sad around the edges," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

DiCillo's "message is as timely and immediate as a 'news flash' on TMZ or Smoking Gun, and will continue to be relevant as long as the media force celebrity culture down the gullets of readers, listeners and viewers," writes Gary Dretzka at Movie City News. But "Delirious also can be enjoyed as a contemporary fairy tale, in which a knight in tarnished armor rescues an emotionally fragile princess from uncouth trolls and barbarians armed with a cameras. Either way one looks at it, the total product is great fun."

Posted by dwhudson at August 13, 2007 12:54 AM