Bellflower
Oscilloscope Laboratories | Release Date: August 5, 2011 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
72
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 25 Critic Reviews
Positive:
20
Mixed:
4
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Jennie PunterSep 29, 2011
Glodell never lets his creation spin out of control. Bellflower revs the engine of an exciting new maverick. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerTirdad DerakhshaniSep 15, 2011
Bellflower has plenty of rough edges and it suffers from a bad case of hipper-than-thou-ness. But it's a triumph. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderJ.R. JonesSep 15, 2011
Glodell seems to be reaching for the nihilistic buddy romance of a movie like "Mean Streets" (1973), but without the serious intent; despite all the roiling emotions, this begins to feel like a pile-up of macho fetish items and stylistic affectations. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsSep 15, 2011
A rewardingly twisted hybrid of low-fi mumblecore and stylized thriller. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertSep 14, 2011
A scrappy indie movie that comes out of nowhere and blows up stuff real good. It also possibly represents the debut of a one-of-a-kind filmmaker, a natural driven by wild energy, like Tarantino. Read full review
38
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanSep 8, 2011
Worse yet is the insincerity of the film's central performances. Too cool by half, Glodell, Wiseman and Dawson speak every line as if it had air quotes around it. In fact, the entire movie feels as though it has air quotes around it. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrSep 8, 2011
Hardly a consistent piece of work, but even when it falls apart toward the end in a mess of bad acting and amazingly youthful pretentiousness, you may find it hard to look away. Handmade and helpless, it's nevertheless the real deal, an artful blurt of sensitivity and rage. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzAug 25, 2011
Bursts at the seams with wild creativity. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleAmy BiancolliAug 18, 2011
The protagonists and their idle dreams of a fiery wasteland may well be nihilistic. But the movie - with its stunning cinematography and lingering aftertaste of old-school heartbreak - most assuredly is not. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovAug 11, 2011
The result is a film that looks like no other in recent memory. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierAug 5, 2011
Like its antiheroes, this slacker tragedy has moments of calm and originality that are sadly obliterated by a tendency toward the extreme. Still, in a kind of reverse apocalypse, the movie's toughest stretch is its first two-thirds, a navel-gazing, semi-romantic nothing-a-thon that falls away in time for the movie to emerge from the ashes. Read full review
75
New York PostV.A. MusettoAug 5, 2011
Brace yourself for an explosively brutal finale. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleAug 4, 2011
With American independent filmmaking all too often a ready punching bag in today's cinéaste culture, this frequently dazzling, eccentric portrait of mutually assured destruction is that most delirious of combos: charmingly funny and emotionally terrifying. Read full review
80
The New York TimesManohla DargisAug 4, 2011
There's more here than initially meets and sometimes assaults the eye, including the hyperbolic dudeness of it all. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternAug 4, 2011
A daring feature debut by Evan Glodell, Bellflower looks like it was shot with the digital equivalent of a Brownie box camera, and generates an almost palpable aura of anxiety. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversAug 4, 2011
Here's a movie that starts in your face and, amazingly, keeps coming at you. That's a good thing. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanAug 4, 2011
Bellflower is stylishly watchable - even when it's preposterous. Read full review
80
SalonAndrew O'HehirAug 4, 2011
Bellflower is a genuine breakthrough, and after its own profoundly flawed fashion, a work of genius. Read full review
42
The A.V. ClubKeith PhippsAug 3, 2011
It is, without a doubt, a striking debut. But it's also punishingly distasteful and disjointed almost beyond coherence, a repetitive heap of a film that feels disgorged rather than crafted. Read full review
80
Time OutDavid FearAug 2, 2011
In one grease-monkey swoop, Glodell proves that he's a subversive talent worth following. Let a thousand of his future projects bloom. Read full review
60
Village VoiceRob NelsonAug 2, 2011
In the end, Glodell's bona fide B-movie is monumentally dumb but damn near undeniable - although perhaps only a midnight drive-in screening in rural Texas, beat-up Chevys dripping muffler fluid and steam hissing from hot gravel, could do it proper. Read full review
83
IndieWireEric KohnAug 2, 2011
Despite its meandering plot, Bellflower presents its doom-laden vision as an astonishingly distinctive state of mind, arguing that the end of one self-made world always marks the start of a new one. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterJohn DeForeJul 31, 2011
It's messy and leaves an unusual taste on the palate, but Bellflower has a strange, ugly-sweet appeal that couldn't have been produced without the schlocky entertainments that have channeled the imaginations of gifted but impressionable kids for decades. Read full review
70
VarietyJohn AndersonJul 31, 2011
A likely cult hit among horror fans and a gleeful affront to more delicate sensibilities, Bellflower takes the young-adult romantic-comedy blueprint and subjects it to a kind of devilish origami, creating a disturbed and disturbing parable about young male fantasies, fears and avoidance of adulthood. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineNick SchagerJul 31, 2011
Evan Glodell's debut has the sweetness of a lullaby reverie and the blazing ferocity of a monster-car nightmare, a first-comes-elation, then-comes-madness structure that resembles that of "Blue Valentine," another tale focused on the commencement, and then collapse, of an affair. Read full review
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