Critical Response
Some critics praised the film and the actors. Others were less enthusiastic. Roger Ebert wrote in the The Chicago Sun-Times, “I admired how the movie tantalized us with possibilities and allowed the doctor and patient to talk sensibly, if strangely, about the difference between the delusional and that which is simply very unlikely.” A. O. Scott, on the other hand, wrote in The New York Times, "K-Pax is a draggy, earnest exercise in pseudo-spiritual uplift, recycling romantic hokum about extra-terrestrial life and mental illness with wide-eyed sincerity”. At Variety, Robert Koehler said, “In a movie treating light dramatically, John Mathieson's lensing makes the screen pulsate with light, shadow and spectral color making any glossed-on special effects irrelevant.” However, Claudia Puig at USA Today concluded, “Besides being saddled with the year's worst title this misguided movie is shackled by its own overreaching sense of importance and foggy earnestness.” Critics at Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 41% rating.
Read more about this topic: K-PAX (film)
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or response:
“I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)
“What I’m saying is that a lot of behavior that you are talking about is a direct response of people not having a future, or feeling that they don’t have a future.”
—William Julius Wilson (b. 1935)