Mick LaSalle of the "San Francisco Chronicle" said the film "has a strong narrative spine, with interesting and big things happening throughout - an unexpected virtue in a family drama. But this virtue is obscured somewhat by the movie's lack of narrative drive. Writer Dan Harris has written himself a tidy little story, but in directing it, he hasn't sculpted a dynamic drama. To put it in another way, there's a lean, mean 82-minute drama encased in this flabby 112-minute film... What saves "Imaginary Heroes" is its essential truthfulness about families, which it reveals, not only in the broad movements of its story but in the small details... Sometimes the film's tone wobbles into farce, which is inappropriate, and often the story treads water, as though mimicking, in tone, every somber family film since "Ordinary People". But, ultimately, it arrives at an authentic and surprisingly powerful place."