Tideland: Critic Reviews

The movie dies early on, but it keeps hanging around, looking a little more rotten with each new scene.

This time [Gilliam] has stumbled into a different no-mana(TM)s land, the one between the merely bad and the completely indefensible.

Deeply disappointing.

Becomes an excruciating exercise in gothic excess and progressively more disgusting imagery.

The movie itself feels like an overstuffed burrito: Nicola Pecorini's cinematography has verve but no visual sense, and the film's self-important pace turns deadening over the long haul.

Gilliam has suffered more than his share of butchered projects, but with this exercise in kamikaze auteurism, he appears to have made exactly the mess he wanted.

A murky swamp of a movie.

It's crazy, dangerous and sometimes gorgeous: a feast of nuttiness that takes you, for a while, over the edge.

The literal train wreck that caps the film is an apt metaphor for this hallucinatory fiasco.

Tideland sees the fanciful helmer overindulging his dark side with a slice of Gothic nastiness.

An endless, pointless drone with characters like bacteria and dialogue like an untuned radio.

A triumph of costuming and production design over plot, theme and main characters.

The film drags in the middle and feels excruciatingly slow and repetitive in the final stretch.

The film has nary a gram of human reality or compassion anywhere in it.

What we get, sadly, is easily the worst production Gilliam has ever been involved in, either behind the camera or in front of it. Tideland is, by turns, a complete bore and a creepy experience. And I don't mean 'creepy' in a positive sense.

A misconceived washout of a darkly gothic story of madness, addiction and child abuse made all the more unpleasant by Gilliam's trademark intense visual style.

Tideland's unmodulated frenzy has the effect of a prolonged shriek, too high and shrill for individual words to make themselves heard.

...in the midst of all the perverse chaos, a story emerges that is easily the most tender and even sentimental in all of Gilliam's work.

It seems, from the flat-out filmic disaster of "Tideland," that director Terry Gilliam is intent on ensuring a decisive end to his checkered filmmaking career.

Now, I like pushing boundaries as much as the next guy. When it's done well, as in say Todd Solondz' wonderfully dark Happiness, it can be searingly challenging. But in the case of Tideland it's just uncomfortable to watch.

Terry Gilliam has again stretched his craft to fashion a work of tragedy-tinged fantasy that uses the full range of dark movie making tools to great effect.

Gilliam appears to be trying to throw us all off-guard, to make the theatergoing experience unpleasant. But in its own unlovable way, the movie is an unforgettable experience.

Gilliam's weirdest -- and most disappointing.