Right at Your Door.

"Citizens of Los Angeles: You are screwed," announces Chuck Wilson from the safety of the NYC's Voice. "Three 'dirty' bombs have gone off around the city... As setups go, this one, devised by art director (Minority Report) turned writer-director Chris Gorak, is terribly precious, and in a less threatening age might have been an easy one to shrug off... The ending, by the way, is ridiculous (let's hope), yet totally unnerving."

"Right at Your Door never even begins to answer the questions it obviously provokes," writes Michael Joshua Rowin for indieWIRE. "9/11 iconography - toxic ash, government lies, frantic and poignant phone calls - is employed, but without a solid humanistic (War of the Worlds) or mythic (Children of Men) foundation Right at Your Door floats in an awkward limbo state."

Updated through 8/26.

Nick Schager in Slant: "Stuck with two irritating characters (proficiently embodied by [Rory] Cochrane and [Mary] McCormack) and a narrative with muddled things to say about love and sacrifice and an undeveloped view of law enforcement as a threat rather than a help, the film eventually seems unsure of where it should go, a situation that - unfortunately, given the high-wire opening - is resolved via a deflating Rod Serling-style twist."

Update, 8/22: IndieWIRE interviews Gorak.

Updates, 8/24: "The film, especially in its resolution, feels a bit like a Twilight Zone episode and might have been better at that length, but the acting's pretty good, and the cinematography keeps things lively," writes Neil Genzlinger in the New York Times.

"Gripping at first, the film turns pointless and mundane by almost imperceptible degrees; only at the very end, with its ironic Twilight Zone twist, do you finally realize that you've been had," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve.

"Cochrane and McCormack have zero chemistry and their characters are so different that they never compute as a couple," writes Pam Grady in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Updates, 8/26: "Not to belabor this point, but the Twilight Zone analogy is so apt, in fact - the focus of the film is completely on two characters, there's a ticking-clock situation, and there's the moral paradox offered up for the audience to chew on - that if a thirty-minute cut of the film were presented as the opening episode of a New, New Twilight Zone, I imagine it would get solid reviews for upholding the basic framework of the old show," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical. "As a feature film, Right at Your Door is manipulative, to be sure, but also clever enough to be fun - and the whole thing benefits hugely from solid acting by both McCormack and Cochrane, who have to scream, cry, panic, collapse into depression and perform just about every other kind of big acting move that you can imagine."

Choire Sicha talks with McCormack for the LAT.

Posted by dwhudson at August 21, 2007 1:08 PM