Breakfast on Pluto: Critic Reviews

Beneath the film's monotony, one senses a whiff of cop-out, of playing it safe: Patrick, for all his tender yearnings, shows no lust, no messy ego. He's a saddened saint in pouffy shirts, and Jordan turns his crying game into one big, long whine.

Neil Jordan's picaresque fairy tale stars Cillian Murphy as an Irish transvestite who is arrested after the bombing of a London disco.

Pluto's story is scattershot, though it occasionally resonates.

Ultimately, the film's detachment is its inspired idea and its inherent problem.

Breakfast on Pluto ambles along nicely, but feels as if it's never going to end.

So dense with dying fizzle and limp ideas that I began to wonder if Jordan has an evil twin, or if there are in fact several Neil Jordans, among them at least one literate stylist and one humor-handicapped village idiot.

The twittering main character quickly wears out his welcome.

If you're in the mood for an edgy, raucous, music-driven gender-bender, rent Hedwig and the Angry Inch instead.

It's a film in and of its own world, sparked by a wicked performance full of wide-eyed wonder.

Jordan is the kind of director you follow out of trust, even when his movies aren't perfect.

Enchanting and hopeful.

We're handed 36 separate chapters in the life of an androgynous sunbeam, but the whimsy is like a piece of caramel lodged between two of your back teeth: a sweet irritant.

[Jordan] successfully grafts two Irish literary modes, snappy social satire and gloomy dirge.

Breakfast on Pluto may seem a fairy tale at times (no pun intended), but this Kitten has claws.

If an eventful life journey doesn't produce maturity or just simple insight, it doesn't feel terribly worth it.

Murphy's tour de force as the eternally optimistic Patrick surely deserves an Oscar nomination. Thanks to Jordan's bravura storytelling, Breakfast on Pluto is one of very few movies this year truly worth remembering.

The film is downright aggravating.

A cunningly crafted fairytale ...

[T]he performance by Cillian Murphy ... is terrific.

You'll be singing along to the soundtrack of Neil Jordan's enchanting Breakfast on Pluto, which boasts the most felicitous use of wall-to-wall pop songs I've ever heard.

While the sunny production values and '70s bubblegum soundtrack carry the film up to a point, there's a more-of-the-same quality to the narrative that simply can't sustain its 36-chapter, 135-minute running time.