Pavements
Utopia | Release Date: May 2, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
76
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 21 Critic Reviews
Positive:
19
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Little White LiesLuke HicksJul 10, 2025
The constant blurring of the lines makes for a fascinating, often hilarious, watch. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comRobert DanielsMay 2, 2025
The only request you can make of a documentary is for it to be as interesting as its subject. Alex Ross Perry’s slippery experimental mockumentary “Pavements,” a film about the 1990s slacker band behind Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, is as gleefully idiosyncratic and as suspicious of mainstream success as the band and its fans. Read full review
91
The Film StageDavid KatzSep 4, 2024
Perry’s film, one of his most accomplished and complete-feeling to date, exists in both a past and conditional tense. It gives a brilliant précis of one of indie music’s most influential artists: in its most conventional passages, it’s a visual and critical biography identifying the key features of their suburban and middle-American backgrounds, their initiation into “alt” culture and the art life as students, and their sometimes loving, often tentative rapport with the 90s’ big-money music industry. Read full review
90
Screen DailyJonathan RomneySep 4, 2024
At once a documentary about the band and its recent live reunion, and a fictional embroidery around its status (and missed opportunities), Pavements is a joyous, slyly subversive celebration that, while unlikely to persuade newcomers to the music, nevertheless catches the band’s wayward spirit, as well as the downright ordinariness that came as an alternative to the bloated rock band ethos. Read full review
83
ConsequenceJonah KruegerMay 28, 2025
Pavements is a genuinely unique watch that turns the idea of a rockumentary upside down. It at once delivers upon fans’ thirst to learn more about the band while respecting the fact that their inconsistent story is part of the appeal. Read full review
83
The PlaylistMarshall ShafferSep 4, 2024
There are meta-movies, and then there’s Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements. Read full review
83
IndieWireAdam SolomonsSep 4, 2024
Pavements is an important documentary. It’s a reminder that the fourth (and fifth and sixth) wall can be smashed, that the rock doc can be reinvented. And that when the message is meta for meta’s sake, why not make the medium that way, too? Read full review
80
The Irish TimesTara BradyJul 9, 2025
Perry and his editor, Robert Greene (using split screens and collage techniques), build a dizzying kaleidoscope of timelines, earnestness and glee. What emerges is a film that’s as formally adventurous and oddly affecting as the soundtrack. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesScott TobiasMay 9, 2025
Let us whisper this part as quietly as possible: Perry sincerely believes in Pavement’s era-defining greatness. And with Pavements, he’s made a film that nobly and triumphantly searches for a way to capture the band’s essence. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalZachary BarnesMay 2, 2025
Pavements is certainly hard to pin down. In that, though, it embodies the band it loves. Read full review
80
ColliderRoss BonaimeNov 26, 2024
Perry’s work in Pavements is one of the wildest and unhinged approaches to a music documentary ever made, but the fact that he pulls it all together into something that isn’t a mess is a testament to Perry’s craft. Read full review
80
The New York TimesAlissa WilkinsonOct 10, 2024
The low-key and never very mainstream Pavement seems like the last band that would get this treatment, and that’s the joke. But it also makes the band the perfect subject for what Pavements is slyly doing, and quite brilliantly, too. Read full review
80
NMEMatthew TurnerSep 10, 2024
Blending fact and fiction in intriguing and unexpected ways, the film is consistently entertaining and can be enjoyed whether you’re a longtime fan of the band or a total newcomer. Read full review
80
VarietyStephen SaitoSep 4, 2024
It’s impossible not to be won over by the director’s efforts, which come to include at least four separate modes of production. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayJun 5, 2025
Once Perry brings his magnum opus to its many climactic conclusions, the bait-and-switchy gamesmanship and sheer swing of his conceit have become irresistibly contagious, and viewers can’t help but be moved. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubJesse HassengerOct 8, 2024
It all threatens to resemble a hat on a hat, possibly worn by a snake eating its own tail. Yet Perry isn’t really going for a trippy hall-of-mirrors approach, even when he cuts together multiple performances of songs so that Pavements past, present, and fake-ass trade verses on their catalog of ’90s non-hits. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerSep 4, 2024
[Perry's] approach is one of a consummate enthusiast and completist, and he does manage to convey that dedicated fan energy on screen. But he doesn’t necessarily make it feel contagious enough. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesJun 5, 2025
Just because Pavements is a prankish film about a prankish band doesn't make it any less deeply heartfelt. It’s one for the fans – and we are legion. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineBrad HanfordOct 3, 2024
Alex Ross Perry’s Cubist portrait finds a fitting balance between reverence and mischievousness. Read full review
60
The New YorkerRichard BrodyMay 2, 2025
The resulting film is a kaleidoscopically shifting—and dazzling—collage of elements that have their irony built in and that, jammed together, meld intense sincerity with self-parody (above all, Perry’s own) in an artificial artifact that nonetheless proves more authentic than a plain and unadorned recording. Read full review
40
The GuardianPeter BradshawJul 9, 2025
Intriguingly, but finally a bit frustratingly, Perry is running four ideas at once, a kind of cine-quadriptych with the plurality signalled by the title. Read full review
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