American Psycho: Critic Reviews

It's hard to summon up enthusiasm for a performance so rooted in bloody banality. I mean, as Patrick, Bale's most emotionally pressing dilemma is: Chainsaw or butcher knife?

Clearly, Harron is sold on the Bateman-as-metaphor bit, and, like Ellis, she overconceptualizes everything.

The slick satire cleverly equates materialism, narcissism, misogyny, and classism with homicide, but you may laugh so loud at the protagonist that you won't be able to hear yourself laughing with him.

Well-filmed, well-acted and certainly riveting, American Psycho nonetheless is a movie without heart about a man without heart.

Harron's Psycho reps an impressive reclaiming of dubious material.

A well-crafted yet essentially innocuous period piece.

American Psycho is nearly perfect for what it is, but before we go on, we should ask what that actually amounts to. Can something with so rigid a thesis be a real work of art?

It needs to be seen and appreciated, like a serpent in a glass cage.

An uneven movie that nonetheless bristles with stinging wit and exerts a perverse fascination.

A brave adaptation of a bracing book.

The movie is elegantly shot, but based on what's on screen, it's hard to tell what motivated Mary Harron to direct this emotionally vapid feature

Mary Harron asks what's more unnerving - exaggerated, imagined violence or vacuous realities some wish to be real, psychosis as much in the construct as the character. Thus, "Psycho's" savagery goes beyond a simple screed against 1980s excess and greed.

much like the 80's era that it personifies

Harron' s incisive eye and Bale' s bravura performance carry the day.

American Pyscho is one of those films that makes you laugh uncomfortably throughout and you just walk away feeling disgusted. The flick is definitely an underrated masterpiece.

Conceptually, this savage cartoon ends up as trapped in surfaces as its shallow antihero: it's all dressed up with nowhere to go.

One can picture Kubrick handling this material with a similar elegant malevolence.

The real shame about Psycho is that there are glimmers of the very smart satire that could've been.

It's a highly entertaining movie with enough edgy humor to prickle our senses.

The film makes wonderfully unsettling entertainment; crucially -- and gloriously -- Bale nails Bateman with a sublimely dead-eyed and deadpan performance.

Mary Harron and Christian Bale create an almost magical balance between the tragic and comic elements of this story.

Production designer Gideon Ponte gives a terrific look to the film, with a hard, ultramodern design that lends sterility to Patrick's personal killing field.

Despite a game performance from Christian Bale, American Psycho never quite achieves lift-off.

American Psycho connects strongly in the moment, and has proven memorable over time, for the vivid impressions it makes in tone as well as look, its potent blends of sound and image, its unusual if erratic points of entry into potentially stock cha

It's smart, frightening and funny.