Critic Reviews

The tyro directors manage to thread a tricky needle with their first feature, navigating the chasm and the overlap between agitated and quiet, between cartoon brightness and angst.

It’s a slice of life, surely, but a meager one at that.

It’s an occasionally interesting, well-acted mess.

The drama in Downtown Owl often feels stilted and too locked in to Klosterman’s observations instead of the character’s actions.

Despite its rueful musings on the time that passes whether or not you’re properly occupying yourself, and despite the clear passion Rabe and Linklater exhibit for this material, Downtown Owl persists in a kind of circular ramble. It’s so transfixed by the process of muddling through that the movie itself becomes an indistinct muddle of its own.

The characters have a myriad of flaws and plights that would have made them compelling, but the film fails to explore them beyond the surface.

This is a movie that neither works as a quirky dark comedy about the hapless people of a small town (on that note, the film is painfully unfunny), nor as a period piece on the anxieties of the Reagan era, no matter how many “1984” references the characters throw at you.