Gerry: Critic Reviews

Gerry meanders, all right, but by the end of the movie, you know that you've been somewhere.

With all its quirks, Gerry seeps into your pores like the wind-whipped sand that stings the faces of these disoriented hikers.

After a while, you may start to feel like Gerry One and Two: a little fuzzy in the brain.

Zzzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Ulph. Umph. Ach. ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzz.

The best way to approach Gerry -- perhaps the only way -- is to treat it as a sanctuary, a film to be visited the way you would a Buddhist temple or a piece of ambient music.

An anxious movie-object that might well wonder whether its minimalist aspiration is a matter of ambitious purity or empty pretense.

On the surface it may seem as barren as its desert, but underneath is a beautiful and surreal meditation.

An innovative and unusually artistic experiment.

The movie is so gloriously bloody-minded, so perverse in its obstinacy, that it rises to a kind of mad purity.

It's definitely one of the strangest films ever made by a major U.S. director -- yet I liked it.

The two stars...[Casey Affleck and Matt Damon]...both playing characters named Gerry, wander across the desert for some reason, and if you enjoy watching them on any pretext, you'll probably enjoy this; if you don't, you won't.

Deserves its own wing in The Old Curiosity Shop.

Even though it is hugely self-indulgent, painfully slow and as repetitive as walking around in circles in the desert, the film has a sort of twisted charm by its end.

Now we know what happens when director Gus Van Sant gets bored. He makes us bored.

This self-indulgent bilge is about -- absolutely nothing!

A series of images that have little meaning or emotional impact beyond their prettiness, and which become less compelling as time crawls slowly by.

If you can get lost along with it, Van Sant's Gerry is actually anything but empty: At times it's tonically liberating.

Fascinating, even if perversely so, and quite beautiful.

I'd be lying if I said it didn't annoy the hell out of me for most of its 103-minute running time. But I might watch it again sometime and try a little harder to get on its wavelength.

The film wears you down in all the wrong ways.

Arty exercise that strands Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (both named Gerry) in a desert with little to say and do except lose themselves in an existential wasteland of doomed beauty.