Critic Reviews

This movie is seriously funny, surprisingly funny, not funny in a way that you ever decide to laugh, but funny like you couldn’t keep quiet even if you wanted to. The laughs, as they say, keep coming.

The Disaster Artist is a hilarious and heart-wrenching ode to outsider art, with a baffling story that would be impossible to believe if it weren’t apparently true. James Franco directs the film with sensitivity and painstaking detail, and gives a fantastic performance as one of the worst filmmakers - and one of the most unusual human beings - ever.

It exists less as an adaptation than a love letter to the film, its large community of fans, and crazy dreamers everywhere.

Franco, who’s absolutely hysterical as the brooding, deluded Wiseau, leads a parade of familiar faces...delivering a winning, Ed Wood-esque blend of comedy and pathos that could very well earn its own cult status.

Franco’s own movie works best as a portrait of the complicated friendship between Greg and Tommy, and it’s an inspired idea to have real-life brothers Dave and James play best friends — we can sense alternating undercurrents of exasperation and affection beneath every exchange.

As a director, Franco succeeds beautifully at bringing coherence to chaos, a word that accurately describes the making of this modern midnight-movie phenomenon. Do you need to see "The Room" to appreciate The Disaster Artist? Not really.

It is hilarious and heartbreaking all at once, especially when factoring in Dave Franco's performance, a beautiful game of shadows in which he's forced to play the more respected artist against his older, more famous brother.

James Franco is fascinatingly weird as Wiseau, and brother Dave Franco complements him perfectly as a regular guy who has little choice but to go with his flow.

Aside from the undercurrent of pathos, it’s James Franco’s impeccable comedic timing that is the film’s ace in the hole.

The Disaster Artist — a new film about the making of The Room — is not only the rare example of a genuinely funny biopic, but a subtle meta-commentary on the state of cult filmmaking.