The Tracey Fragments: Critic Reviews

Viewed as the sum of its sad incidents, The Tracey Fragments seems like the kind of adolescent melodrama that has become a staple of young-adult literature.

Unlike the frustrating gimmickry of Mike Figgis's Timecode and Hotel, McDonald's bedazzling multi-frame experiment poeticizes and enhances an otherwise slender story (forgivable at only 77 minutes long)...

The Tracey Fragments is a grating stunt that plays like a film-school project, cutting a bland story into a million tiny irritating pieces.

This audacious puzzlement is worth seeing, I guess, for some startling and innovative visual designs. But it doesn't amount to anything more substantial than a technical tour de force.

Ellen Page remains one of the few stellar newcomers who deserves to be seen in anything she chooses to do.

I have a feeling that this is the last time we'll see a down-and-dirty Ellen Page.

This is a tough watch, but a rewarding one for those open to experimentation.

By the time The Tracey Fragments fills in its last dark fragments, they don't have the emotional impact they probably should have.

Even with the film's scant running time of 77 minutes, the unrelenting use of Mondrian splitscreen is bound to give anyone a headache.

An exploration of the heightened, extreme emotional sensations of adolescence, The Tracey Fragments is demanding and relentless, an image overload in search of resolution.

The split screen has never been used so purposefully or with such aesthetic care, capturing the multiple perspectives of a character who cannot separate reality from illusion because the whole world is inside her head.

To criticize a film called The Tracey Fragments for being too fragmented may sound a bit on-the-nose, but this experimental drama from Canadian director Bruce McDonald is interesting for a while and then goes to pieces.

I hated this movie. I really did.

All this proves is that watching a poorly executed scene from 19 perspectives is worse than watching it once in an unbroken frame.

[Page is] virtually the sole reason to see this duller-than-it-sounds experiment.

Will be remembered as a shard in Page's filmography.

This angsty Canadian movie directed by Bruce McDonald takes its title all too literally: Every sequence is splintered into multiple split screens, which means that you can follow the dreary, semi-incomprehensible action from many viewpoints at once.

But Tracey Berkowitz is the anti-Juno: Where Cody Diablo's heroine is insouciant and confidently nonchalant, Tracey is angry, insecure and filled with an unsettling self-loathing, which Page brings to life with a searing immediacy.

Even the adorable Ellen Page is entitled to perform in a dud.

Arty to the nth degree, splintered and, yes, fragmented

Director Bruce McDonald splits his screen eight ways to Sunday in The Tracey Fragments, a splintered form ostensibly intended to match the psyche of his protagonist.

The cinematic equivalent of a hyper-pretentious, solo performance piece whose style grows tiresome before you've even finished reading the playbill.

Director Bruce McDonald deserves high praise for the chance he takes, here, departing from convention by experimenting with split screens for the duration of the claustrophobic psychodrama.

i pseytoabagkarntistiki fioritoyra poy kanei ta 77 lepta na moiazoyn 7oro, prospathei me ti dihos oysia haritomenia tis, na desei monologoys se eniaia afigisi, kai mporei na se ksegelasei otan to blepeis, alla ligo an to baleis sti seira tha akoyseis ton

Self-indulgent and relentlessly unpleasant...