Critic Reviews

• David Jenkins, Time Out

  This is an undoubtedly modest yet wholly pleasurable tale about the difficulties that come with letting go of youth.

• Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

  With Marnie, Dollenmayer has managed to transform a sad sack into an indie screen goddess.

• Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

  While the film has a true lived-in feel, and demonstrates a burgeoning talent on the part of its young auteur, its portrait of young slackers lacks the freshness to overcome its all too vivid malaise.

• Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times

  By simply re-creating what he has observed, Bujalski has created a tender, funny and stealthily affecting portrait of youthful powerlessness and frustration.

• Robert Koehler, Variety

  A beautifully observant and wholly unpretentious film with roots more in Cassavetes than Sundance-style showbiz.

• Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

  It raises so many little questions and offers so many quiet insights that one sitting isn't enough.

• Xan Brooks, Guardian [UK]

  Smart, subtle and excruciatingly honest.

• Wendy Ide, Times [UK]

  Refreshingly unpolished, the film uses pained silences like punctuation.

• Jon Fortgang, Film4

  Not actually that funny ha ha, but a sensitive and unforced little film about the aimlessness of post-graduate life.

• Laura Bushell, BBC

  Low budget and intimate, perhaps to the point of belonging on the small screen rather than the cinema, its still an intelligent and unpretentious slice of life true American life.

• Doris Toumarkine, Film Journal International

  Isn't much more than a promising calling card that should take director, cast and crew to the next level.

• Derek Smith, Cinematic Reflections

  One of the most accurate portrayals of post-collegiate disillusionment

• Nick Schager, Lessons of Darkness

  Bujalski's subtly well-constructed film reveals a charmingly idiosyncratic sincerity.

• Scott Weinberg, DVDTalk.com

  If Bujalski's goal was to create a "you are there (and eavesdropping)" sort of narrative, he's done a fine job of it.

• Sean Axmaker, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  (Bujalski's) easy naturalism creates an unexpected comic lightness for something so laced with ambiguity.

• Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid

  The film's acutely composed dialogue is at once disturbingly empty and brutally poignant.

• Chris Garcia, Austin American-Statesman

  Funny Ha Ha is a jagged bite of real life, shambling about with humor, sadness, boredom, excitement.

• Marrit Ingman, Austin Chronicle

  Bujalski has a knack for letting scenes build and then cutting out abruptly, duplicating the flow of a life in flux.

• Frank Swietek, One Guy's Opinion

  Made on so frayed a shoestring that it looks like a Dogma project minus the glitz and about as vacuous as its array of clueless twenty-something characters.

• Cherryl Dawson and Leigh Ann Palone, TheMovieChicks.com

  The tagline says, 'This would be sad if it weren't so funny', well guess what, it's not that funny, so it must be sad.

Read all 22 critic reviews