Look: Critic Reviews

Look, an unsettling, rudely funny but not entirely credible feature by the writer and director Adam Rifkin, is an ensemble narrative for the age of public surveillance.

Look isn't processing, critiquing, or even warning; in the end, it's just recording.

Orwell would have loved it.

The performances feel natural, improvised, and it's easy to believe this is the world we inhabit.

Unexpectedly amusing and inevitably disturbing.

There are some funny moments, plus occasional nudity and sex, but the joke quickly wears off. What might have worked as a half-hour TV show doesn't suit itself to a feature-length film.

A funny, filthy, dark-hearted ensemble drama.

A skillful examination of the things people do when they think no one's looking.

With its emphasis on its interweaving stories, the movie offers no commentary on the phenomenon of increasingly pried-apart privacy, positive or negative.

Rifkin has a cynical view of human behavior and he plays it for cheap titillation and bleak humor, which is mean-spirited at best and glib at worst.

By the end, you're ready to call for the abolition of video surveillance, if only so that you can stop watching all these irritating characters.

Not much is what you get with this bargain-basement attempt at Altman. It has 'direct to video' written all over it

If Crash had been this interesting it might have deserved that Oscar; this movie lacks polish but that is precisely what makes it work. It's a very interesting experiment, one which I found entertaining, nervewracking, and rewarding.

The effectiveness of it in capturing our attention attests to very fine writing and editing which serve the mockumentary framework with immediate gripping power.

This could have amounted to nothing more than a clever trick, but it's much more than that.

If the idea is that we're always being watched, why does it seem that in this movie, no one's really paying attention?

Rifkin skillfully interweaves plotlines in a way that makes this currently much overused device seem perkily adroit rather than tiresome.

This is a great example of what you can do with not a lot of money as long as you're willing to think outside the box.

Rifkin's film is surprisingly compelling, if not up to dealing with the larger political issues it raises.

Some of this isn't easy to watch, but it's all worth a Look.

heavy on concept, not content

Even if "Look" exploits reality TV by boosting a sub-marginal plot with very realistic security camera footage it is still a great perspective into our brave new world

It brings up lots of questions to ponder and mostly succeeds as a fascinating, if frightening statement on the way we are.