Clean

Name: Clean
Genre: Drama, Music
Released: August 12, 2005
Duration: 90 min
Rating: 75
Cast: Maggie Cheung, Nick Nolte

2005

METASCORE

Generally favorable reviews based on 28 Critic Reviews

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USER SCORE

Generally favorable reviews based on 15 Ratings

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7.1

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7.1	User Score Generally favorable reviews based on 15 Ratings

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Movie Details & Credits

Palm Pictures | Release Date: August 12, 2005 | R

Starring: Maggie Cheung, Nick Nolte

Summary: A desperate woman with a drug problem seeks to put her life in order to regain contact with her little boy.

Director: Olivier Assayas

Genre(s): Drama, Music

Rating: R

Runtime: 90 min

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Critic Reviews

100

David Sterritt

100

Stephanie Zacharek

Cheung is one of the finest actresses working today, an expressive, lustrous beauty capable of plumbing a boundless range of emotional hues. This is the greatest performance she's given to date. Read full review

Roger Ebert

Emily is played by Maggie Cheung with such intense desperation that she won the best actress award at Cannes 2004. Read full review

Jessica Reaves

Clean is above all a movie about making peace with uncertainty and doubt and living with the aftershocks of the choices we make. Not the easiest task, but it may be what redeems us in the end. Read full review

V.A. Musetto

Cheung and Nick Nolte seem unlikely co-stars, but co-star they do in Clean, giving gritty performances under the direction of Frenchman Olivier Assayas. Read full review

Ann Hornaday

It's the moral journey of Nolte's character that is the real story in Clean, but Assayas instead focuses on the manipulative habits of an addict, resulting in a mannered study of narcissism and self-pity. Read full review

David Rooney

Dramatically pallid and unconvincing. Despite being written for her, the director's "Irma Vep" muse Maggie Cheung seems oddly miscast here and is ill-served by an emotionally underpowered screenplay that rarely gets beneath the surface of the character's problems. Read full review

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ChadS.

Apr 22, 2007

"Clean" might be a film in code about the most infamous of all rock-and-roll widows, but I hope not, since Allison Anders' "Sugar Town" had already done a fine job of eviscerating(again, in code) this woman, who nevertheless, love her or hate her, arguably served the important and "Clean" might be a film in code about the most infamous of all rock-and-roll widows, but I hope not, since Allison Anders' "Sugar Town" had already done a fine job of eviscerating(again, in code) this woman, who nevertheless, love her or hate her, arguably served the important and underrated function of muse for the troubled drug-addled musician. Emily Wang(Maggie Cheung) is also universally hated by the music industry for fueling her husband's appetite for poison, but like her real-life counterpart, she played a part in her husband's artistic triumphs by incident; by just simply being there(without Love in Kurt Cobain's life, maybe he might've simply been a Black Francis-wanna-be). The fact that Emily is Chinese makes her unpopularity complicated since the hatred she's encumbered with might be a two-fold attack(the public's distaste for Emily's heroin addiction could be a cover-up for the real issue at hand; she's Asian), which the filmmaker smartly leaves to our imagination; the only mention about Emily's ethnicity comes from her uncle. "Clean" elects to keep Emily's withdrawal from heroin largely off-screen(leave the writhing in agony to Darin Aronofsky); the film is more concerned with her redemption. A filmmaker with a heavy hand would demonstrate a recovering addict's unfitness to be a parent by staging a relapse. What this director does is brilliant; he casts doubt about Emily's ability to exercise sound parental judgment by the mode of transportation she supplies for her son. "Clean", led by Cheung's glamorous, yet somehow gritty performance, has us rooting for her every step of the way to a recovering junkie's nirvana.… Expand