Noise.

"The story of a New York yuppie who embarks on a one-man vigilante campaign against sound pollution, Noise is never quite as smart as it tries to be," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. "But as summer and its mouth-breathing blockbusters loom large on the horizon, there's something touching about a movie that even tries."

"Tim Robbins should get out and stretch those funny bones more often, if it results in a performance as luggishly nutty as he gives in this likable - if intellectually overstuffed - urban comedy from writer-director Henry Bean," suggests Ella Taylor in the Voice.

Updated through 5/12.

"It's impossible to care about David's victory for metropolitan ears or triumphant sense of empowerment, however, when Noise never rises above being a tepid urban fantasy unwisely extended into a slight meditation on modern male powerlessness, devoid of insight to the point that it amounts to so much, well, you know," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"Yes, Bean has finally given cappuccino-sipping NPR listeners their very own Death Wish with Noise," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

"The movie, whose cacophonous soundtrack, when turned up, conjures your worst nightmare of sirens, car alarms, jackhammers and sundry aural assaults, is a one-trick film that rapidly wears out its welcome," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

"[William] Hurt's performance [as Mayor Schneer] is upstaged in its awfulness by his fawning assistant (played by one of the Baldwin brothers who is not Alec; okay, it's William), and both men are bad signs that the movie is transpiring in an alternate universe," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun.

"There hasn't been such manifest smugness on screen since The Squid and the Whale," grumbles Armond White in the New York Press. "Noise is only about validating middle-class privilege."

Update, 5/12: "Bean's touch is unsteady, and Noise is certainly odd, but the movie is alive with the creative madness of New York," writes David Denby in, well, the New Yorker. "Surely a more glamorous actor would have given Noise a lighter, more satirical spin, but Robbins makes David a lost, unhappy man who needs to save himself, and that's the right way to go—it turns a one-note story into a universal fable."

Posted by dwhudson at May 10, 2008 9:45 AM