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Metascore
30 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 75McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreMcClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreYou’d have to go back to the ’80s to find a film with this jaded a view of Hollywood, a town where every aspiring actor knows every yoga instructor who knows every producer and they all swap partners and dance. Constantly.
- 70VarietyScott FoundasVarietyScott FoundasThe major exception is Lohan, who gives one of those performances, like Marlon Brando’s in “Last Tango in Paris,” that comes across as some uncanny conflagration of drama and autobiography. Lohan may not go as deep or as far as Brando, but with her puffy skin, gaudy hoop earrings and thick eye makeup, there’s a little-girl-lost quality to the onetime Disney teen princess that’s very affecting.
- 70Village VoiceStephanie ZacharekVillage VoiceStephanie ZacharekPeople who don't understand movies often speak of them as escapism, a kind of passive fantasy. Lohan's performance in The Canyons, so naked in all ways, is the ultimate retort to that kind of idiocy: To watch it is to live in the moment.
- 53Film.comFilm.comThe Canyons has all the elegance and depth of a daytime soap opera, peppered with flashes of name brand nudity for a tantalizing hook. It’s a slog.
- 40The New YorkerDavid DenbyThe New YorkerDavid DenbyThe Canyons is not porn, but it has the demoralized second-rateness and the lowlife inanity of the porn world.
- 33IndieWireEric KohnIndieWireEric KohnInstead of commenting on the vapidity of the film industry, Paul Schrader's miscast, poorly executed and utterly soulless drama is an example of the failing art form it seeks to indict. Though it has real ideas, Schrader and his team never manage to put them into action.
- 30The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyThe Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyFar from the renegade, boundary-pushing, sexually explicit sensation that its makers have been suggesting, The Canyons is a lame, one-dimensional and ultimately dreary look at peripheral Hollywood types not worth anyone's time either onscreen or in real life.
- 25The PlaylistRodrigo PerezThe PlaylistRodrigo PerezThe cavernous emptiness of The Canyons cannot sustain itself, and it makes for a mostly flat, strained and uninvolving experience (not helped by the pace which makes 90 minutes, feels like a sluggish two hours).
- 20Time OutJoshua RothkopfTime OutJoshua RothkopfShe (Lohan) isn’t the best thing about this awful, lounged-out drama — it has no best thing — but in her defense, Lohan has been atrociously directed, allowed to get away with the worst aspects of her vocal-fry laziness, and trotted out like a symbolic objet d’art.
- 12Slant MagazineChuck BowenSlant MagazineChuck BowenPaul Schrader and Brett Easton Ellis don't have the sense of play this kind of narrative of one-upmanship requires, as we're never allowed to enjoy the characters' misdeeds.