The Dreamers: Critic Reviews

Bertolucci is so drunk on deja vu he has made a movie that's really a flossy assemblage of Bertolucci signifiers.

Bernardo Bertolucci's new film is an ardently romantic love song to sex, cinema and the spirit of the 60's.

Not good for you, but wickedly pleasurable all the same.

The siblings, in particular, grow so irritating with their cultural tunnel-vision that even the film's explicit sex grows monotonous, and its lack of humor grows irritating.

Do these characters really care about the collected works of Godard? Not for one Parisian minute.

It is both a love song to escapism and a warm embrace of the real world -- a wake-up call that one place, without the other to occasionally return to, would make life for us (who are the real dreamers) far less wonderful.

It's funny, affecting, interestingly twisted, and seriously erotic before it heads south in the final stretch.

Bad, but unlike the similarly camped-up Little Buddha or Stealing Beauty, it's not exactly boring.

For the easily titillated, among whose company I count myself, the rewards are plenty in this curious menage a trois among college students in 1968 Paris.

It is a well-made film in many ways, but I found in the callowness of these youths nothing to admire.

Ambitious and uneven, visceral and pungent.

A rich movie filling the viewer with a four-course French meal of sensuality, politics, ideas and character.

Exhilarating.

They aren't making revolution in this hothouse, they're making a listless blue movie.

Above all it evokes a time when the movies -- good movies, both classic and newborn -- were at the center of youth culture.

It's a movie so physically beautiful and ardent that it can make you fall in love or lust against better judgment.

Its nostalgia and narcissism are ultimately two versions of the same thing, and neither can reopen cross-cultural channels. Instead they keep this story stuck in the past, frozen and intact and irrelevant.

Knowing that a character prefers Chaplin to Keaton tells us only about his taste, not about his soul.

It's wonderful to see a film that takes back sex from the smutty teen comedies, that grapples with political ideas and shouts its love of cinema from the rooftops.

An out-of-print postcard of a movie, neither shocking or smart enough to matter in the modern world, and too disjointed to be involving.

The Dreamers makes its point with clips of old films. And yes, there is quite a bit of sex and nudity.

A film about youth and passion that seems old and passionless.

At a reflective and still romantic 63, Mr. Bertolucci pays heartfelt hommage to Henri Langlois' famous theater, Cinematheque Francaise.

A kind of art-house Showgirls -- which actually exceeds Showgirls in its self-indulgence, shallowness and sheer stupidity.