Stateside: Critic Reviews

The way that all of this plays out is so unconvincing that I felt as if I was watching a lost Project Greenlight movie in which half the key scenes, after testing into the basement, had been chucked at the last minute.

This muddled drama begins as a high school soap opera, segues into a boys-to-men military drama and peters out as a feeble answer to Girl, Interrupted.

It's so unexpected and unpredictable and so full of tiny grace notes that its ultimate collapse seems almost irrelevant.

Turns out to be not so much a movie about a Kwazy Person as it is about a Stoopid Person.

Stateside's real-life frame allows the complexities of mental illness and military service to lose dramatic tension, resulting in a desultory home stretch.

Plays like a movie of the week.

Though much of the movie feels as undeveloped as Mark is, it manages to end the way any decent love story must -- on a sweet, touching note that makes us want to forgive the unsteadiness along the way.

Although based on a true story, it never establishes its own identity, often playing like warmed-over J.D. Salinger.

Stateside plays like urgent ideas for a movie which Anselmo needed to make, but they're still in note form.

A diluted, scattered drama -- less than the sum of its parts, but with an impressive cameo list.

Mexican writer-director, Reverge Anselmo, is clueless about how to make any of it believable, cogent or even remotely interesting.

Contrived and emotionally incomplete, and strained further by self-consciously cockeyed dialogue.

Writer-director Reverge Anselmo handles sensitive issues not with kid gloves, but with a metaphorical baseball mitt, fumbling with tone and obviously laboring to force quirks upon characters and situations.

The promise of something startling and compelling goes unfulfilled, and the arc of the central love story isn't interesting enough to sustain the drama.

Anselmo, basing his script on a true story, juggles more plots than a full season of The O.C., setting his cast adrift in a sea of soap-opera bubbles.

The film manages to hit all the emotional beats, but most land with a resounding thud.

Well-acted but ultimately bland...

Stateside has some lopsided storytelling techniques, but emotionally it will get you home.

Simples e sensivel, o filme traz uma atuacao estupenda de Rachael Leigh Cook.

With a better cast than it deserves and a script from which it deserved better, the film is pleasant where it should be rowdy, quaint where it should be refreshing, and altogether far less daring than it thinks it is.

It's as though the actors showed up on the set, picked their lines out of a hat, than spoke them in no particluar order.

The lovers' nonexistent chemistry doesn't generate enough heat to light a match.