The New Age

Tolkin gives us one richly detailed set piece after another, involving luncheons, openings, massages, telephone tag, psychic consultations, sex, heartfelt conversation, and pagan rituals led by a bald-headed woman who sees what others cannot see. Read full review

Michael Tolkin's THE NEW AGE is something new, a comedy of horrors that's brittle, hypnotically hip, and so cool it almost freezes the audience out. Read full review

A dark, ambitious, unsettling piece of work. Read full review

A sometimes smart social commentary on Los Angeles characters who seek spiritual salvation when they can't buy every object they want. Judy Davis and Peter Weller play a trendy couple who look like they are from the outtakes of "Short Cuts" and "The Player." Read full review

A brave stab, nevertheless, with a finely executed finale as Peter sets about his ironic salvation. Read full review

What sustains The New Age through these falterings are its edgy stars, its lively unpredictability, and the essential seriousness of Mr. Tolkin's thoughts. Even when working in an atypically upbeat mode, in a film that never dares follow its dark prophecy to the bitter end, he sustains a disturbing frankness. [16 Sept 1994, p.C5]

Tolkin's characters are annoying, yet there is something appealing in their misguided and consumer-driven search for the higher meaning. Tolkin's script may not measure up to the fast-paced verbal sparring of The Player but Judy Davis' performance is, as always, mesmerizing and hilarious. Read full review

Although it's fascinating, intelligent and scathingly accurate in its depiction of a certain milieu, The New Age is a more problematic picture than 1991's The Rapture - where Mimi Rogers played a sexually adventurous woman who finds spiritual succor in fundamentalist Christianity. [23 Sept 1994, p.03]

The movie ends up playing like a series of skits and one-liners, some of them pointed and funny, that strain to achieve structure, substance and a workable ending. Fortunately, Judy Davis and Peter Weller are Tolkin's stars, and they're capable of providing a center for almost anything. [23 Sept 1994, p.H3]

At one point in The New Age, the terminally stylish post-yuppie couple played by Peter Weller and Judy Davis put on their fanciest threads in order to commit double suicide, but can't go through with it. Like them, Michael Tolkin's film gets all dressed up but doesn't quite know where to go. Read full review

It's nearly impossible to put together a picture about ennui without dramatically succumbing to it in a big way. Michael Tolkin, talent that he is, isn't yet the movie maker to meet the feat. Read full review

The problematic result is not that The New Age is bleak -- bleak is fine. We all like bleak. The problem is that The New Age becomes static. [30 Sept 1994, p.C1]

The movie is what it is, a deadeningly literal look at ozone spiritualists and s-&-m purveyors (possibly one and the same) who toss some very spirited pool parties. A better title than the current marquee anonymity might be Naked Brunch. [16 Sept 1994, p.5D]

The New Age plays like "Night of the Living Dead," only with better clothes. [23 Sept 1994, p.52]

The film is organized in episodes, each one leading pretty much to the same conclusion, which is these are not folks we want contributing to our gene pool. Once that's understood, The New Age settles into a tiresome repetitiveness. Even its wittier turns-and, as "The Player" demonstrated, Tolkin has a caustic wit-play curiously flat. [23 Sept 1994, p.N]