Slipstream: Critic Reviews

Slipstream is Anthony Hopkins's third film as a director and his first as a quasi-avant-garde filmmaker working well outside the mainstream.

Hopkins claims it's a comedy, and perhaps John Turturro's live-action cartoon of a mogul producer suggests so, but what does it all mean? That art can be just as shallow as Hollywood?

Leave it to a 69-year-old actor to make the year's most experimental film.

Slipstream is bold, experimental, off-the-wall kicky and utterly exasperating.

[It] can either be viewed as one huge home movie or a plaything from an actor who has been observing other filmmakers for decades.

At 96 minutes, this vanity/insanity project runs a bit long; five minutes would have been plenty.

I'm glad that Hopkins has apparently been using the bland, middlebrow stage of his acting career to experiment with massive doses of psychotropic chemicals and open the doors of perception and all that. Next time, maybe he'll just write a manifesto.

The veneer of stylistic hyperactivity can't conceal the starkly banal dialogue and a roster of performances that seem, under the circumstances, hardly directed at all.

Slipstream is an experiment in visual stream-of-consciousness, but stream-of-consciousness fares better as a literary form than a cinematic one.

Alternately interesting and unwatchable.

Slipstream is utterly unwatchable. I hated every minute of it.

A Hopkins personal vanity project

What would have perhaps made an excellent short subject becomes a cumbersome, confusing and deeply unsatisfying mess of a vanity project.

A miserable mess of a stream-of-consciousness movie.

Slipstream ultimately winds up an avant-garde film that just ain't all that avant.

Has one trick up its sleeve, and once that trick is revealed, the film collapses in on itself in a manner that will irritate more viewers than it intrigues.

...makes you long for a pretentious, arty student short. Because those are only about eight minutes long.

[S]o fascinating a failure that it's worth seeing...

If not exactly dull, Hopkins' stream-of-consciousness rant is nonetheless self-indulgent and crammed with bits of business that never add up to anything much.

Anthony Hopkins wrote and directed Slipstream. It's a free-form, surreal meditation on stuff that, evidently, popped into Hopkins' head while he was writing.

Slipstream fails miserably as a film about moviemaking, writing, REM sleep and historical atrocities.

A fever dream as much about life and death as the experience of making a movie and watching one.