Mysterious Skin: Critic Reviews

Mysterious Skin dawdles more than it flows, but it comes alive whenever Araki, hovering between tragedy and voyeurism, reveals how sex can tear lives to pieces.

Mysterious Skin is infused with remarkable tenderness and beauty.

There is a terrible, terrifying honesty at the core of Mysterious Skin that will make it chillingly recognizable to some viewers and important to recognize for others.

While watching this movie, I scribbled the word 'whoa' five times into my notebook.

The usual Araki elements are here (hustlers, rebels, uproar, the absurd), but now he appears to be working with focus and compassion.

As a filmmaker, Araki, always brash, has rarely been so confident, creating a shimmering mood that allows for multiple shifts in perspective and register.

A well-conceived story that is very hard to shake.

This is a challenging and ultimately moving film that deserves to find a like-minded audience.

You're likely to be bruised by its truths. To his credit, Araki has made that a risk well worth taking.

A complex and challenging emotional experience.

Even though it takes you to places you may not want to go, the film never loses its human touch -- that feel of skin on skin or of the past inescapably invading the present.

Manages to deal with its raw, awful subject matter in ways that are both challenging and illuminating.

By the time the climactic revelation finally comes, it's such old news that all the scenery chewing that accompanies it seems alien.

The audience has gotten the point roughly 90 minutes before the characters do.

The adult Neil is ably incarnated by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the same is true of Brady Corbet as the grown-up Brian.

This is like Almodovar, with a tarnished American flag in his hand: controversial, illuminating, deeply affecting and highly recommended.

Gregg Araki delivers his most challenging and arguably most mature film.

Not for the squeamish, but it is a beautifully crafted and thoughtful film that genuinely provokes.

As tough as it is to take in, and perhaps even tougher to contemplate, Mysterious Skin demands serious consideration and appreciation for Araki's evident maturity. He's a grown-up, finally.

Parts are beautiful, other parts are brutal (like a rape scene that oddly evokes the Psycho shower scene), but it doesn't jell into a satisfying whole.

It's a film that deals with childhood sexual abuse in an original and dry-eyed manner rarely seen in our culture today.

The film has a weird buoyancy.

Beyond Gordon-Levitt's revelatory work, Mysterious Skin features intense but gorgeously restrained performances by Corbet, Shue, Jeffrey Licon as Neil's effeminate pal, Ellison and George Webster as the boys, and Michelle Trachtenberg.

It's hard to imagine a more serious or persuasive indictment of the horrors inflicted on children by sexual abuse.