Crazy Love: Critic Reviews

It's a freak show of a fairy tale, rendered by a filmmaker who knows how to pierce tabloid reality right in its anguished, bloody heart.

Far too readily tends to play this pathetic story for laughs.

Simultaneously disturbing and luridly entertaining.

You can make of it what you want. [Director] Klores offers no cheap psycho-babble.

Crazy Love scrapes away the cartoon exterior around this story and peers into the unknowable murk of the human heart.

That there's enough 'plot' in this bona fide melodrama to fill a dozen docs is conducive to the movie's near-total evasion of outside perspective.

Interviews with Burt and Linda Pugach, the New York couple whose tabloid lives are chronicled in Dan Klores' docu-curio Crazy Love, have been politely nonjudgmental. After seeing the movie, I'd like to say I hate one and pity the other.

... though Crazy Love remains a far cry from heartening, it is more amusing than disturbing, especially given the cranky yet symbiotic couple of today.

Dan Klores' crazy relationship doc Crazy Love takes a tale tailor-made for sensationalist treatment and sculpts it into a riveting three-act drama.

I could tell you all the surprises that make the loopy documentary Crazy Love such an odd treat, but then I'd be undermining the whole point of telling you to go.

The movie distills every functionally dysfunctional relationship you've ever had into one horrific case study.

The fascinating documentary Crazy Love is a real-world story in which possessiveness, stupidity, loyalty, and need are joined together in bewildering combinations.

Crazy Love seems to promise a demented, true-life film noir love story and winds up delivering an above-average A&E documentary.

A documentary about a mad love affair, a movie that's about as compulsively watchable as a great tabloid headline story is compulsively readable -- and also a lot more rewarding.

Jaw-dropping true crime, this video documentary by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens balances neatly between tabloid headlines and unfathomable intimacy.

A Bronx tale full of jaw-dropping behavior and jaw-dropping hairdos.

Some stories are so weird they could only be true.

Crazy is the word for it, and if writer-director Dan Klores seems a bit too sympathetic at times, he still lays out a twisted story of obsession that ends in well-maintained mutual madness.

Particularly because many viewers have already seen the TV-news version, almost any other genre would have been even more compelling -- a fictionalized drama, perhaps, or Truman Capote-style narrative non-fiction.

It's too easy to feel superior to these two people and their marriage in hell for the sake of some easy (or even uneasy) laughter.

The sheer fascinating strangeness of the people documented could earn the pic a minor cult following.

This astounding saga, which is told strictly in chronological order with lots of well-chosen film clips and photographs, is recounted mostly by the now elderly Pugach and Riss themselves.

You can't make this stuff up.

Formally, [director Klores'] film is a standard-issue documentary, combining period footage with talking-head interviews. But his talking heads are a hoot and their story is a Gothic yarn of obsession, crime and forgiveness.

When your subjects are raconteurs on the level of Burt and Linda Pugach, you could train a Fisher-Price toy camera on them and let the movie make itself.