Look.

"The gimmick of Adam Rifkin's forgettable Look is that it's comprised entirely of footage from surveillance cameras, or at least footage from cameras meant to simulate surveillance cameras," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "So guess what happens in its very first scene? Two teenage girls strip and cavort in a clothing store dressing room! Doesn't that just shock and arouse you? Allow you to see private events you weren't meant to see while also forcing you to question your own motivations for watching them? No?"

"There's plenty of gimmick here, but no gravity," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. "At least Brian De Palma's Redacted and George Romero's Diary of the Dead wield their peeping-tom filters for more ambitious purposes, and Michael Haneke's Caché teases and implicates audiences by drawing focus to the camera's eye. Look isn't processing, critiquing, or even warning; in the end, it's just recording."

Updated through 12/15.

"[B]etween the likelihood of surveillance cameras capturing every dramatically significant moment (with crystal-clear sound) and the filmmaker's deployment of ripped-from-the-tabloids ugliness to amp up viewer involvement, Look grows less compelling and believable as it unreels," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times.

"Look is really less about what is observed than what is revealed - each story line relies on plot twists rather than being fully realized character sketches with telling behavior," writes Michael Ordoña in the Los Angeles Times.

"The whole thing feels so heavily scripted that it brings down the overarching impact," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "The misguided route raises the question of what kind of juicy stories might be produced by the real thing. It's hard not to imagine a better movie buried in some CIA vault—assuming that it hasn't already been burnt."

"If it's less an artistic statement than it appears to be, Look is a healthy reminder that paranoia is not always a bad thing," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "Just because you can't see anyone doesn't mean they can't see you."

"[T]he real question might be 'Who does Adam Rifkin, the director of Detroit Rock City, think we are when nobody's watching?' and the answer is a bunch of farting, drunk, murderous, teenager-fucking louts," writes Peter Smith at Nerve.

Update, 12/15: Hugh Hart talks with Rifkin for Wired News.

Posted by dwhudson at December 14, 2007 8:28 AM