Reservation Road: Critic Reviews

Bad things happen and terrible choices are made in the very sad, very nerve-racking, very good melodrama Reservation Road.

The tears and the blame mix uneasily in Reservation Road, a grim, mechanistic thriller about death and suffering, life and healing among the civilized.

Unfortunately, the film grows contrived.

You know exactly where the story is going, and, dang, that's exactly where it goes.

The real problem with this movie isn't its trashy side. It's the creepy note of causal judgment that hangs over it concerning the potential nightmare of parental visitation and enforcer ex-wives.

Reservation Road is one of those movies where the characters suffer early and often.

Unrelentingly bleak, the movie is nonetheless a riveting drama with some outstanding performances...

A deadly earnest and deadly dull psychological thriller.

It starts with devastation and closes, after a few reels of narrative dithering, with a climax of hairpin emotional turns and indisputable power.

For all of the roiling emotion, it feels oddly flat, distant and one-dimensional.

In the elegaic, beautifully acted Reservation Road, both [Phoenix and Ruffalo] are trying to find a path toward wholeness and each will need the other to find it.

The best efforts of the performers cannot authenticate a plot that no longer feels inevitable. It feels contrived. And the audience stays at a remove instead of entering someone else's nightmare.

Painful but illuminating.

A film of distinguished performances that rise above a coincidence-riddled and perfunctory screenplay -- without redeeming it.

Reservation Road is a car wreck of a movie about an auto accident. It's designed as a psychological suspense film, but every character development and plot twist can be seen far in advance. It's a mystery with no guessing.

An exercise in frustration and wasted opportunities.

This movie probes your inner conscience without losing sight of its breathless entertainment value.

A dramatic situation that should be wrenching is mostly tedious in Reservation Road.

All of them [the cast] dazed with Oscarlust, aren't in on the joke they're telling.

The major failure here is fear of the very emotions the movie purports to be about.

Reservation Road is all about the darkness that lurks in the hearts of men, and although it's dark in there, all right, the power of redemption is always a possibility. This dour, ponderous picture just can't show the way.

...You resent the manipulative mechanics of the story.

A flawed presentation of compelling material and intriguing characters.

The film gets caught somewhere between domestic weep-athon and revenge melodrama.

Original and gripping.