Critic Reviews

As Rappaport puts his flamboyant vision on the screen without compromise, The Artist can be somewhat exhausting, but he has assembled a dream cast and he knows how to stimulate them. .... It’s best to just knock back another absinthe and be grateful that, as a singular work of art, The Artist somehow exists.

It’s the sort of absurdist comedy that used to turn up in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, something like the works of Robert Downey Sr. or William Klein, or maybe an ambitious film student’s senior thesis, given a big budget and access to talent; in its very lack, or perhaps avoidance, of subtlety it feels very old-fashioned. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it bad, or for that matter good, but it seems to me the perfect realization of the creator’s idea, and there is something in that.