The Canyons
IFC Films | Release Date: August 2, 2013 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
36
METASCORE
Generally unfavorable reviews based on 30 Critic Reviews
Positive:
6
Mixed:
10
Negative:
14
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
83
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanJul 31, 2013
Schrader tries to find the human side of it all, and he scores with Lohan, who taps a vulnerability beneath her dissolution to remind you why she's still a movie star. Read full review
75
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreJul 30, 2013
You’d have to go back to the ’80s to find a film with this jaded a view of Hollywood, a town where every aspiring actor knows every yoga instructor who knows every producer and they all swap partners and dance. Constantly. Read full review
70
SalonAndrew O'HehirAug 3, 2013
As a visual symphony, The Canyons is often masterful, and while it may be pornographic in places, it’s never campy. At the center of its cold, beautiful and half-dead world is the almost incandescent Lindsay Lohan, burning like a flawed diamond. Read full review
70
Village VoiceStephanie ZacharekJul 30, 2013
People who don't understand movies often speak of them as escapism, a kind of passive fantasy. Lohan's performance in The Canyons, so naked in all ways, is the ultimate retort to that kind of idiocy: To watch it is to live in the moment. Read full review
70
VarietyScott FoundasJul 30, 2013
The major exception is Lohan, who gives one of those performances, like Marlon Brando’s in “Last Tango in Paris,” that comes across as some uncanny conflagration of drama and autobiography. Lohan may not go as deep or as far as Brando, but with her puffy skin, gaudy hoop earrings and thick eye makeup, there’s a little-girl-lost quality to the onetime Disney teen princess that’s very affecting. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Geoff PevereAug 1, 2013
The Canyons is actually anything but gratuitously sensational. On the contrary, it’s rather restrained, even conservative affair, far more interested in expositional conversation and a sustained tone of bleached-out melancholy than cranking up the heat. Read full review
53
Film.comMatt PatchesJul 30, 2013
The Canyons has all the elegance and depth of a daytime soap opera, peppered with flashes of name brand nudity for a tantalizing hook. It’s a slog. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsAug 15, 2013
The Canyons may not work, and the sex (as well as the synthesized glop on the soundtrack) may be tragically unhip, but it was made by a director who still cares. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliAug 3, 2013
The Canyons is a sleazy soap opera that fails primarily because it gives us no one to care about and no reason why we should be interested that we don't care. Read full review
50
The DissolveMatt SingerJul 31, 2013
If Schrader and Ellis set out to prove that movies are dying or already dead, they might have done their job too well. The Canyons doesn’t play like the cure for a moribund industry, so much as a mildly effective, highly depressing administration of the last rites. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyJul 31, 2013
In The Canyons, there’s no pleasure — only power struggles disguised as sex. Read full review
42
Portland OregonianMarc MohanAug 22, 2013
The Canyons comes across as a desperate gambit for relevance by a group of artists who want to reinvent themselves but don't know how. Fittingly, that's the theme of the film itself. Read full review
40
CineVueAdam LowesMay 21, 2014
Despite a liberal dose of full frontal nudity, The Canyons fails to fully revel in its sleaze, struggling to even work as a deadpan satire on the kind of vacuous and deadened Hollywood types Easton Ellis brought to life in the pages of his debut novel, Less Than Zero. Read full review
40
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierAug 3, 2013
The Canyons has more in common with Schrader’s opulent immoral tableaux “The Comfort of Strangers,” “Auto Focus” and “The Walker” than with his other work (including the script for “Taxi Driver”). It’s weaker than those, though, and less biting. Read full review
40
The New York TimesManohla DargisAug 1, 2013
With The Canyons, [Mr. Schrader] tries to get at something real under all the hard, glossy surfaces, but ends up caught in the divide between the movie that he seems to have wanted to make and the one he did. Read full review
40
The New YorkerDavid DenbyJul 29, 2013
The Canyons is not porn, but it has the demoralized second-rateness and the lowlife inanity of the porn world. Read full review
33
IndieWireEric KohnJul 30, 2013
Instead of commenting on the vapidity of the film industry, Paul Schrader's miscast, poorly executed and utterly soulless drama is an example of the failing art form it seeks to indict. Though it has real ideas, Schrader and his team never manage to put them into action. Read full review
30
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzAug 15, 2013
Paul Schrader, the once-brilliant screenwriter of such films as “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” has fashioned a movie that seems to exist to be repugnant. Maybe that’s the point; it was written by Bret Easton Ellis. Nearly every character in this movie is unlikable. Read full review
30
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranAug 8, 2013
The Canyons is a bad accident everyone saw coming, and now it is here. Read full review
30
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinAug 3, 2013
The Canyons isn’t just bad, it’s rank — and it takes a peculiar sort of integrity to denude the frame of life to the point where it smells to heaven. Read full review
30
NPRIan BuckwalterAug 2, 2013
Judging from the lack of care that went into making this one, I'm not so sure how much Schrader cares about the movies anymore either. Read full review
30
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyJul 28, 2013
Far from the renegade, boundary-pushing, sexually explicit sensation that its makers have been suggesting, The Canyons is a lame, one-dimensional and ultimately dreary look at peripheral Hollywood types not worth anyone's time either onscreen or in real life. Read full review
25
USA TodayClaudia PuigAug 10, 2013
The Canyons is billed as an erotic thriller, but the sexcapades of these empty-headed twentysomethings are far more likely to elicit yawns than titillation. Read full review
25
RogerEbert.comChristy LemireAug 2, 2013
Maybe the joke’s on us, and all the pre-release hype suggesting that a micro-budget train wreck was barreling our way was merely part of the marketing strategy. Read full review
25
Rolling StonePeter TraversAug 1, 2013
Stephen Rodrick's New York Times article about the making of The Canyons had humor, suspense and propulsion. They should have made that movie. What we have here is dead on arrival. Read full review
25
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezJul 30, 2013
The cavernous emptiness of The Canyons cannot sustain itself, and it makes for a mostly flat, strained and uninvolving experience (not helped by the pace which makes 90 minutes, feels like a sluggish two hours). Read full review
20
Time OutJoshua RothkopfJul 30, 2013
She (Lohan) isn’t the best thing about this awful, lounged-out drama — it has no best thing — but in her defense, Lohan has been atrociously directed, allowed to get away with the worst aspects of her vocal-fry laziness, and trotted out like a symbolic objet d’art. Read full review
12
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperAug 15, 2013
The best acting in The Canyons is done by the porn star. That might be all you need to know about this film, which is the kind of vapid, self-consciously artsy, waste-of-time movie that might never have seen the light of day (or the dark of theater) and would have gone straight to VOD were it not for the triple-threat name-recognition trio of the actress Lindsay Lohan, the director Paul Schrader and the writer Bret Easton Ellis. Read full review
12
Slant MagazineChuck BowenJul 30, 2013
Paul Schrader and Brett Easton Ellis don't have the sense of play this kind of narrative of one-upmanship requires, as we're never allowed to enjoy the characters' misdeeds. Read full review
0
New York PostLou LumenickAug 1, 2013
Paul Schrader’s The Canyons is not the worst movie of 2013 — it's marginally better than "InAPPpropriate Comedy" and "Scary Movie 5," two even worse bombs that Lindsay Lohan also lent her rapidly diminishing talents to — but it is surely the most boring I’ve seen. Read full review
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