Toronto. Mister Lonely.

"I think I'm ready to declare my personal best-of-fest," blogs the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy. "Harmony Korine's known for his polarizing, envelope-pushing works - he wrote Kids, and directed Julien Donkey-Boy and the immortal Gummo - but Mister Lonely is easily his most accessible film to date. Which, uh, isn't to say our man Harmony is hewing to some newly boring path."

This is "by far the filmmaker's most imaginative movie yet featuring a story that feels more traditional than anything he has ever directed," writes Tom Hall. "This is a good thing; the tale of a band of misfit celebrity impersonators who form a community 'where everybody's famous,' Mister Lonely is both a celebration of private dreams and a tragicomic representation of the pathos that ensues when those dreams come true."

"There are seven or eight very good ideas in Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely, most of them visual, and they are executed with humour and cinematic flair," writes Matt Riviera. "Unfortunately, the film that he has constructed (with his brother Avi) in order to bring these ideas to the screen is less than the sum of its parts."

"[O]ne day, maybe Korine will make a film that I'll like," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Still a failure overall, but two or three films from now, maybe Korine will have turned it around."

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Posted by dwhudson at October 2, 2007 8:01 AM