Mixed or average reviews - based on 27 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 27
  2. Negative: 7 out of 27
  1. A pulsating snapshot of America caught in a mad, liberating identity crisis.
  2. 75
    The agony of invention is there on the screen.
  4. Toback presents specific characters dealing with specific problems and, through their stories, somehow manages to take the temperature of the times.
  5. Immediately disarming for its candor, verve, and sheer nerve.
  6. Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    Gleefully pushes everyone's buttons...and that manages to exploit our own racial discomfort and envy in ways that leave us hungry for more.
  7. Fascinating, perplexing, amusing, and irascible.
  8. 60
    A sui generis excursion into sex and race that is by turns terrible...and close to divine.
  9. 60
    This lively mess proves that when Toback loses his head, he does it with style.
  10. Reviewed by: Robert Horton
    Works best as a free-flowing essay.
  11. 60
  12. Reviewed by: Jack Kroll
    Maverick moviemaker James Toback has latched on to the most fascinating cultural phenomenon of the American moment.
  13. 57
    An audacious but underconceived blend of fiction and documentary that questions the idea of race and identity in America.
  14. There's something deeper at play in the film, something psychologically foul, voyeuristic and personal.
  15. 50
    At heart a cliché-strewn melodrama about a bunch of white, upper-class Manhattan kids who aspire to ghetto culture.
  16. 42
    Too often monochromatic, programmatic and just plain lost.
  17. 40
    Strident and bombastic.
  18. 40
    Toback's method of presenting the evidence without judgment backfires, finally appearing just as shapeless as the movie's structure.
  19. Reviewed by: John Hartl
    The movie is such a mess that it seems to have been assembled from pieces randomly picked from the cutting-room floor.
  20. Reviewed by: Sean Means
    When your characters are only skin deep, so is your message.
  21. Reviewed by: Mike Clark
    Sometimes laughably incoherent.
  22. The voyeuristic indulgences of a middle-aged filmmaker playing out his most deep-seated and unresolved sexual fantasies and anxieties.
  23. There is really no one to like in this film.
  24. 20
    Peaks with its opening scene.
  25. Reviewed by: Pauline Adamek
    When worlds collide - people yawn.

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