The Nines: Critic Reviews

You'll go ''Huh?'' but you won't feel cheated.

The Nines is a philosophical mind teaser with satirical fangs.

It is pretty familiar material in some ways, and not exactly unpretentious, but very watchable.

The dialogue snaps, crackles and pops. And confusing as they may be, the stories are never boring.

There's more than enough intelligence, intrigue and performance dazzle to make this an adventuresome gizmo for grownups.

The Nines, which in real life began as a TV project, wavers uncomfortably between satire and dime-store existentialism on the big screen.

The movie never fails to be crisply written and cannily delivered, but it's way too steeped in TV-culture inside jokes for its own good, and August's attempts to suffuse the whole thing with ontological or theological meaning are ultimately pretty dumb.

An offbeat, unpredictable story that plays out in parallel universes.

Confusing? Yes, and intentionally so. But it's never boring.

Bright and vicious, desperate and cruel, the characters of the first two stories pop with a kind of nihilistic joie de vivre that makes you want to hug them and kill them at once.

It defies categorisation, which I love, and defies logic, which is very European. But it's also clever, funny and compelling

An interesting, if high minded, concept film that is nothing without its performers.

The sort of movie that would probably appeal to Ryan Reynolds' detractors . . .

August is on solid ground when he's riffing on Stephen King and celebrities, but he's stretching when he tries to be David Lynch, which would require a distinctly different kind of brain damage.

August may be peddling some absurd New age "secret", but at least it allows him the benefit of stronger and more coherent storytelling.

Em sua estreia como diretor de longas, August faz jus a inteligencia de seu roteiro intrincado, criando uma historia tensa e instigante que surpreende tanto como ficcao quanto como reflexao metafisica/religiosa. Alem disso, o elenco revela-se fortissimo.

When I read that Ryan Reynolds was playing not one, but three characters in this movie -- one of whom is gay -- my ticket pretty much bought itself. They had me at 'himbo'.

Overall, I responded to The Nines as a sly Cronenbergian chess game of the mind. As impenetrable as it becomes, it's easy to perceive that this is straight-from-the-heart work from August.

The plot tumbles so far down the rabbit hole it breaks its leg and plunges the audience into the dark.

I have no clue whether this is the most religious film of the year, or the most blasphemous film of the year.

The film puts a delightful spin on that profound and solipsistic idea that we are the godlike inventors, and moral arbitrators, of our own little worlds. A gem.

Sometimes a product's creative integrity requires that it not quite attain a ten - but when it comes to the cinema of big ideas, The Nines is as close to divine perfection as you are likely to get.

Definitely worth a look.

Let's avoid such extremes, and note merely that he's made a film that's funny ha-ha as well as funny peculiar; an exercise in navel-gazing that tickles all the senses.