Critic Reviews

John August directs it briskly, as a gossip-era "Twilight Zone" of image and reality.

It's an intricate, at times incoherent, but often funny and consistently fascinating trio of stories with the same actors in different but related roles.

This movie is metaphysical fun, and while some elements are predictable, it’s an engaging mystery.

Rather than come across as fantastic or dreamlike, the stories have a vivid, hyperreal quality to them.

It's an overall heady conceit about image and invention, clever and fun with compelling lead performances -- especially Reynolds, who finally gets to show some chops in a career littered with Van Wilder–grade junk.

The payoff fizzles, but the buildup is intriguing until it topples under its own weight.

The Nines arcs from witty Hollywood insiderdom to a climactic metaphysical leap that may leave many viewers nonplussed. Nonetheless, there's more than enough intelligence, intrigue and performance dazzle to make this an adventuresome gizmo for grownups.

The movie never fails to be crisply written and cannily delivered, but it's way too steeped in TV-culture inside jokes for its own good, and August's attempts to suffuse the whole thing with ontological or theological meaning are ultimately pretty dumb.

Think of it as a kind of “Twilight Zone 2007” in which the paranoia endemic to an industry that runs on illusion, hype and extravagant grandiosity comes home to roost.

Wavers uncomfortably between satire and dime-store existentialism on the big screen. It's sort of as if Charlie Kaufman rewrote "The Fountain."