The Night Listener: Critic Reviews

... the movie doesn't cohere.

Based on a novel by Armistead Maupin, which was based in turn on an episode in Mr. Maupins life, The Night Listener explores a shadowy region between truth and fiction.

Robin Williams's face is permanently on its smiling-through-emotional-pain setting.

The Night Listener reveals itself in a grippingly quiet and enigmatic style reminiscent of Hitchcock.

Aiming to blur the distinctions between truth and illusion, it simply blurs its own effectiveness by relying on predictable and not particularly convincing mystery-thriller formula.

Adapted from Armistead Maupin's highly anticipated, woefully executed 2000 novel, this is surely among the best bad movies of the year.

As a consideration of the power of storytelling -- and the urge to mythologize one's own life as well as the lives of others -- The Night Listener could serve as creepy paranoid cousin to the current Lady in the Water.

Noone [Williams] is a lethargic, beaten, humorless man, and the film is plugged into the same lifeless energy source.

More intriguing than enthralling, more creepy than disturbing, The Night Listener runs a tidy 80 minutes yet still feels stretched.

The story, effective in print, doesn't survive onscreen scrutiny. You'll feel detached and, even with its brief 82-minute running time, you'll get impatient.

The pacing and staging of the later scenes could use a little more electricity and momentum, and a little less restraint. Yet The Night Listener keeps you watching. And listening.

It's a relief to see Williams underplaying for a change and letting us fill in the blanks, but the movie's suggestiveness gives way to a certain thinness and lassitude.

The Night Listener has flaws, particularly a double ending that raises more questions than it resolves, but it conjures a haunting mood of anxiety that settles around you like a shroud.

The movie might make for a good book, but it's too awkward and lacks the necessary action for a film. And Williams' rather sluggish approach doesn't help much. Eventually, we just aren't interested in tagging along with him.

A creepy head-scratcher more atmospheric than believable.

This Sundance dud is a turgid gay soap opera with a limp twist, showcasing Robin Williams at his maudlin worst.

Night Listener draws you in to a tale well-told.

There's more to this story than meets the eye -- or ear -- especially when Collette, magnetic in her intensity, appears as a figure straight out of Vertigo or North by Northwest.

Williams' solemn one-note performance, which we've seen variations of before in his 'serious films,' Insomnia and Good Will Hunting, ruins what should be a ghoulishly entertaining game of cat and mouse.

This thriller about books, belief and betrayal covers topical terrain -- JT LeRoy and James Frey, anyone? -- but itself proves unbelievable.

An eerie, occasionally disturbing motion picture focused on the differences between perception and reality.

The Night Listener is one of the few films that manages to be highly cerebral and a great popcorn movie simultaneously.

Ultimately, The Night Listener is more admirable for what it tries to be than for what it actually achieves.

The film's over-leveraged plot imparts diminishing results as its predictable revelation arrives with an unsatisfying anticlimax.