Reception
The film received very mixed reviews. On the website RottenTomatoes.com it sports a 44% approval rating, certifying it as "rotten". One of the common complaints among its critics is that they felt it moved much too slowly. Despite its detractors, however, Hodges' movie managed to find some formidable defenders. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars, saying, "...there is a tangible pleasure in following enigmatic characters through the shadows of their lives; deprived for a time of plot, given characters who are not clearly labeled and assigned moral categories, we're allowed to make judgments based on their manner and speech." Writing for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, "Does the film work? All I know is that it stays in my mind for its ambitiously autumnal essence, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea." According to Owen Gleiberman, "Hodges...still knows how to unspool a mystery with a hypnotic pace of sadistic intrigue." Slant Magazine's Nick Schager awarded the film a full four stars.
Read more about this topic: I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)