Buried: Critic Reviews

Rodrigo Cortes, the Spanish filmmaker behind this diabolical, Hitchcock-influenced narrative stunt, makes merry mischief with camera angles and lighting; the viewer feels suffocated along with Reynolds...

Either Mr. Reynolds was directed to rant and rave, or his bellowing tantrums are meant to signal that Paul is a childish fool who isn't very bright.

By the end, I was quietly wheezing and whinnying with distress.

An experiment in limitation that, at least until the movie's deflating final payoff, manages to tap into our deepest anxieties.

Reynolds's default has always been a sarcasm that's locked him out of seeming entirely human. In Buried, he's neutralized.

Rodrigo Cortes keeps the action bound to the box, limiting his lighting to naturalistic approximations, so that much of Reynolds's performance consists of him grunting and heaving in the dark.

Although the entire movie takes place in the enclosed space, director Rodrigo Cortes and writer Chris Sparling are ingenious in creating more plausible action than you would expect possible.

This is shrewdly considered and edited genre work, spiced -- bitterly -- with the right variety of complication.

As a cautionary tale about the perils of nation building, this is both creepy and provocative, but director Rodrigo Cortes blows it in the last few minutes with a rushed ending that feels like a cheat after all the escalating tension.

Nothing this underrated actor has done previously measures up to the emotional diversity, focus and self-control required of him in a one-man exercise in underground suspense that Alfred Hitchcock would envy.

In purely cinematic terms, Buried, set in late 2006, is an ingenious exercise in sustained tension that would make Alfred Hitchcock turn over in his grave.

On a technical level Buried is impressive, at times blisteringly suspenseful, making the most of a ripping score and Reynolds' fully charged agony...

You have to remind yourself to breathe.

The tension keeps building, right to the end. Proving yet again that in movies, even though the space may get smaller, the picture doesn't have to.

The suspense is gripping, even when the substance isn't.

The basic conceit, which never falters right through to the surprise ending, speaks creepy volumes to a cinematic audience -- blanketed in darkness with no exit strategy.

In the same way it's impossible to turn away from a grisly accident, taking your eyes away from Ryan Reynolds' hypnotizing performance is not an option.

A horror film set in Iraq is a cinematic tour de force but raises serious questions about its ethics.

Whatever the reasons that draw us to the movies, spending 90 minutes trapped in a box with Ryan Reynolds isn't one of them.

If the aim is to be unpredictable and to revel in cynicism, you run the risk -- realized here -- that the movie becomes more an authorial statement of purpose than a story the audience can believe in.

Ninety minutes of being buried alive with Ryan Reynolds: Didn't we all suffer that in The Proposal?

Conveys the intensity and introspective horror of its subject's extreme life-or-death circumstances far more authentically and grippingly than the similar, flashier and shallower 127 Hours.