Reality Bites

Ryder, good as she was in The Age of Innocence, gives her first true star performance here. Beneath her crisp, postfeminist manner, Lelaina is bristling with confusion, and Ryder lets you read every crosscurrent of temptation and anxiety, the way her tentative search for love slowly grows into a restless hunger. Yearning, hilarious, lost within their precocious self-awareness, these slackers have soul. Read full review

The great thing about Reality Bites is that each of the characters comes across as real, and not some glib concoction by a screenwriter who's watched them from a cloistered distance. Childress obviously knows their world inside out, and shares it with insight and a prickly, original wit. [18 Feb 1994, p.C1]

It takes a spectacular cast to pull off this kind of meandering romantic comedy, and Reality Bites couldn't have done better. Read full review

Ryder, Hawke, Stiller and Garofalo turn these paradigms into wonderfully tasty characters. Written with verve and played with grace, Reality Bites is too smart to pass itself off as a definitive statement, but it gets the details delightfully right. Read full review

It's slick, but also heartfelt. It's for those who think it's cool to watch "Brady Bunch" reruns and uncool to watch MTV, and it's got terrific performances by Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Ben Stiller, who also directs this very appealing canter through the vocational and emotional minefields of our downsizing trash culture. [18 Feb 1994, p.33]

The movie ultimately plays as a dead-on snapshot of the much-maligned post-Baby Boomer generation. In 10 years, Reality Bites might seem dated and irrelevant. Right now, it feels remarkably astute. [18 Feb 1994, p.G5]

The first film that comes close to capturing the Bohemian flair and everyman accents of Generation X life while remaining a first-rate piece of entertainment. Stiller and his knowing screenwriter Helen Childress fashioned a wise, very funny film that brightens the slow early going of 1994. [18 Feb 1994, p.6]

But if "Reality" is full of twentysomething Esperanto, it's perfectly understandable -- and enjoyable -- to anyone who speaks humor. While its age ceiling seems a little low at times (at least, for this old man), the comedy constantly breaks through. There's a rousing, engaging spirit on the loose, more than emphasized by 32 songs on the soundtrack. This is an MTV-era movie: If you don't get it, as they say of a certain newspaper, you don't get it. Read full review

Reality Bites principally turns on the romantic tension between Ryder, wonderfully radiant and not all that literate for the class valedictorian her character is purported to be, and Hawke, who does the alienated-poet thing better than anybody since Matt Dillon's greaser in "The Outsiders." Read full review

Among the movie's strengths are the performances, especially that of Ryder, who comes across as bright, beautiful and more delicate than ever before. The lead roles in this film are the sorts of roles that she and Hawke really ought to be playing ones that allow their contemporary vibes to work for them. The film's shortcomings are those of youth and with one exception they are easily forgiven. Read full review

It's Stiller's knowledgeable use of these smaller touches that (along with the excellent cast -- it's great to see Winona relinquishing period gowns and back where she can do some real damage) pushes the film along a solid, fresh line and toward its admittedly Hollywood conclusion. Stiller and company imbue their film with an honest, sarcastic wit that's all too familiar: apparently, somebody's been filming our lives. Does this mean we'll all be getting royalties? Read full review

By spinning something fresh out of something familiar, Reality Bites scores the first comedy knockout of the new year. It also brings out the vibrant best in Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke as friends who resist being lovers, makes a star of Janeane Garofalo as their tart-tongued buddy and puts Ben Stiller on the map as a director. Read full review

The best -- the brilliant -- bits of Reality Bites etch in epigram, anecdote and brittle, dazzling dialogue the inner life of young people who want desperately to believe but haven't decided in what. It loves them but it doesn't pity or sentimentalize them. It's tough as nails. Read full review

At its best, this entertaining romance blends the zesty dialogue of a classic screwball comedy with the nonstop energy of a Post-Modern pastiche. Read full review

Sneakily funny and hopelessly romantic, Reality Bites speaks with the distinctive, ironic voice that marks it as The Graduate of Generation X. [18 Feb 1994, p.03]

Childress has an ear for dialogue that rings true even when it's self-consciously movie-ish, and Ryder and Hawke bring crucial authenticity to their roles with effortless appeal. You'll find yourself wanting more of these characters than the movie gives you. Read full review

Underneath, it's a flashy crock-another piece of self-congratulatory formula wish-fulfillment masquerading as hip. This would-be "inside" comedy about not selling out sells out in virtually every scene. Read full review

Ultimately, what saves this movie is its sense of humor, not to mention its good humor, which is not the same thing. You find yourself rooting for these characters, although at times you wouldn't mind giving them a little slap up side the head. [18 Feb 1994, p.3F]

A surprisingly sweet romantic comedy debut from Ben Stiller. Read full review

The performances are all just fine; I wish they'd been at the service of another movie. Read full review

In fact, it's often genuinely funny--but it's still an establishment picture pretending it's not. Read full review

Bites may have a bit more on its mind, but it never equals even the weakest scene in Cameron Crowe's "Singles". [18 Feb 1994, p.5D]

There's probably a moderate little romantic comedy crying to get out here, but the film's vain striving for casual hip proves suffocatingly obtrusive. Read full review

The verite of this saga of Generation X is that it is no more fierce than a peck. "Reality Bites" begins as a promising and eccentric tale of contemporary youth but evolves into a banal love story as predictable as any lush Hollywood affair. Read full review

If you care whom she winds up with or why, you probably caught more of the TV references than I did. Read full review

Reality Bites embodied seemingly every odious post-Nirvana media trend. The title alone was laughably faux-hip, and the movie's portrait of slackerdom—limply enacted by Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, and Janeane Garofalo—was both broad and shallow...No one acknowledges the obvious—that a heinous idea got even worse when Stiller signed on to direct. Read full review