Detachment: Critic Reviews

Brody, as the semi-fallen idealist, has a haggard eloquence, and Tim Blake Nelson, Christina Hendricks, and James Caan, as his colleagues, act out a bitterly funny spectrum of desolation.

Even at its most ludicrous - when it is shouting into your ear - its sheer audacity grabs your attention.

It's watchable enough, but the bludgeoning screenplay seems undercooked compared to the high-grade actors on show.

The movie's motives might be admirable, but its execution is so bogged down in impenetrable old-white-guy self-pity that the real problems facing public education and its practitioners get buried in the wallow.

It's nice to see righteous anger in a movie. If only the education drama "Detachment" knew what to do with it.

The movie works, and, though it cries out against so much, you sense that the one thing it does not cry is wolf.

Adrien Brody, one of the weirdest looking actors of the millennium, plays Henry Barthes, a man so emotionally blocked by a lifetime of disillusion that he cannot connect with any other human being.

Brody is brilliant, but can't save the Book of Job proceedings from tilting over into the ludicrous.

"Detachment" quickly gets stuck in its own world-weariness.

Detachment gets an A for enthusiasm but a C for execution.

The film is guilty of reverse sentimentality, where the relentless unhappiness comes to seem as manufactured and artificial as the schmaltz in a romcom.

Despite many nameable flaws, [it] is a wrenching and powerful achievement...

Harrowing depiction of the American educational system features a superb performance by Adrien Brody.

Everywhere you turn in Detachment, someone is trying to make you feel like hell.

Detachment gets to you. It hits hard.

There's something weirdly effective about the artistic desperation, which includes inserts of chalkboard animation and to-the-camera testimonials.

It's a film so well paced with a message so relevant that it deserves an audience bigger than what it got and it deserves more of an emotional impact than will resonant throughout.

While Adrien Brody gives it his all in his performance, the film suffers greatly from an attempt to equalize its multiple plotlines.

Even a talented director like Tony Kaye (American History X) and a great performance from Brody can't save a mess like this.

Detachment is the sort of film-of-the-week that ought to appeal to anyone who loves movies in the purest sense.

Detachment has such original energy and is so infused with righteous anger that it proves hard to dismiss.

The acting is excellent but the movie is the sort of thing that gives pessimism a bad name.

Despite its title and central theme, Tony Kaye's complicated lament for values abandoned and children betrayed leaves little room for indifference.

Grappling with the dilapidation of America's school system is fair enough, but the movie is painfully undone by its pretentious poetry of despair.

Admittedly, the film is heavy-handed in places, but it still makes you sit up and take notice.