Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

SnoopyStyle College student Sara Quinn (Julianne Nicholson) conducts a study by interviewing men with stories of disturbing behavior. She also starts observing men in the outside world. She has dates with Ryan (John Krasinski).Nicholson is playing it very passively. The interviews are visually extremely static. There are so many men as subjects that none of them are compelling enough to care about. I suspect that the source material is difficult to adapt. John Krasinski may not be equipped to do so much of the heavy lifting. In the end, he did not find a way to translate this into a watchable movie.

dsaroff Couldn't finish watching this film. It used the contrivance of men being interviewed to create an exposition on male / female relations.I found it choppy (quick cuts between scenes and interviews and even within interviews). It pontificated and had the stilted quality of a stage play. The interviews were uninteresting and stereotypical monologues and the men were mostly caricatures. While it tried to be deep, it was deep in the way an undergraduate is deep (meta criticism within the film itself) - a fist full of knowledge, poorly digested and portentously revealed.The lead actress was a passive doll throughout most of what I saw with whom I neither empathized or cared. I didn't care about any of the characters, and the construct of people talking to the camera outside the interviews was too self conscious.It was a film school, self-conscious mess with no heart and too much head, uninterestingly directed.

chuck-526 This film "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" is adapted from a collection of short stories of the same title by the deceased David Foster Wallace. The short story form remains paramount. Several themes are investigated: what is love? what bonds a couple together? how do private life events affect public research agendas? what b.s. is stereotypically common? You might assemble ideas in a novel way; you might have an epiphany ...but you might not. The story doesn't much care. What's more important is the dramatic arc of the story itself.I didn't notice the running length of the film (although several others have commented on its relative shortness). To me the length was "right" for the story. Figuring out the time sequence of the events might be tricky, and might steal your attention more than it should; keep the synopsis "a graduate student copes with a recent breakup by conducting interviews with various men" in mind at all times.There's lots of variety in the ways the mens' stories are told. Initially I imagined a list of unbroken formal interviews back to back - various "talking heads" sitting on the same chair in front of the same wall. But the reality of the film isn't like that at all. Each of the threads makes use of different devices: flashbacks, flashforwards, flashsideways; intermixing formal interviews with informal contacts; overheard conversations; jumping between internal narration and external events; casual conversations at house parties and academic department parties and bars; imagination played out realistically right in front of your eyes; characters morphing into others; asides with related characters; and so forth. And almost all of the threads are broken into segments that are intermixed with other threads; themes are much more of an organizing principle than time. Even the formal interview segments are broken up by cuts --or faux cuts-- so there's never a dull visual moment.Some of the cut techniques are new to me. In every case the sound is seamlessly continuous - a spoken sentence remains a spoken sentence without any gaps or shifts. But the words are sometimes split between the same character at different times saying the same thing. Or they're split between different characters speaking a very similar --or even the exact same-- thing. Or they might (and this is what I've termed "faux cuts") have a hitch in the image as though a few frames had been spliced out - nothing as big as a change of camera angle, but a visual discontinuity nevertheless. (Are these faux cuts the next "Ken Burns effect"?) To my mind considerable audio and visual editing skills --well beyond what's typical of most new director's efforts-- are demonstrated here; the conventional words are "production values are high".If you listen very closely there are a few internal jokes. For example usually the interviewer pokes the tape recorder and says "do you mind if I turn this on?" But once she says "do you mind if I turn this off?" The words make no sense and aren't consistent with the action, and are easily overlooked.I liked the adaptation of the short story form, and I hope it blazes a path for other future films. To my mind the weak link though is the acting. Much of the material is extremely subtle and challenging, and would overwhelm even many A-list stage actors. But the film's actors are neither veterans nor geniuses. I found a couple of the casting decisions just plain jarring: one of the waiters seemed awfully wooden, and failed to convey some intended humor; and the imagined father figure bathroom attendant looked younger than his son! Apart from these, the acting varies from workmanlike up to quite good ...but nobody "burns up the screen" even when the material cries out for it.The well-known TV persona and skills of the director (which admittedly I'm not at all familiar with:-) don't seem to be any sort of guide to something as completely different as this. Like a typical "art house" film, this is not for everybody. At the small screening room where I saw it, one person noisily fell asleep and another walked out. But while this film asks for an open mind and some investment of mind-share, you'll be richly rewarded.POSTSCRIPT: I've become aware from some others' comments and from an interview with John Krasinski that some of my impressions and even some of my "facts" may be so far off the mark they're just plain back-assward. I seem to have missed some of the comedy, misidentified some of the characters, misjudged some actors' experience levels, and who knows what else. Now I'm doubting myself, wondering if I really saw the same movie or if I paid sufficient attention the first time. Ambiguity and multiple interpretations are part of the point, but not so much as to account for all the distance between my views and some others. I'm now resolved to watch this film a second time. In the meantime please put what I've opined under advisement -- and go see for yourself.POST-POSTSCRIPT after second viewing next day: I couldn't find any evidence of "the hitchhiker" character, either in the film itself or in the credits. My hypothesis is after Lucy Gordon's unfortunate death but before final release, the film was re-cut to remove all the scenes that included her. My guess is there were originally a lot of flashbacks in what's now John Krasinski's monologue. That's where the hitchhiker's story appears to fit best, lots of cuts there too would have made that segment much more stylistically similar to the rest of the film, and the film would have had a more typical length. Also, I've softened my view on the acting – many of the performances are really very good. My bottom line is unchanged though: in the end the extraordinary material overpowers the acting. We're talking King Lear here, but we're not quite talking Laurence Olivier.

Randykoren You see, I would like to make it clear that I approve of this movie. A bunch. A lot, even. I was thankfully lulled into the rhythm of the film, as so rarely happens in movies these days. Light, yet full of depth, easy going down, like a fine brandy or rum. I'd say this movie is perfect to have in the background on a loop at a small party. Or watch it all the way through. Pair it with a nice wine or brandy and your favorite smoke. Good Stuff. Kudos to the director and his choice of acting moments. This movie contains a series of wonderful monologues that are obviously written with inspiration and hard-earned experience. Superbly well acted and casted. Unexpected and extraordinary.