Critic Reviews

• Peter Debruge, Variety

  Their lives eventually intersect, but in more or less arbitrary ways.

• Kyle Smith, New York Post

  Slow ride to nowhere.

• Stephen Holden, New York Times

  A low-rent answer to Robert Altmanâ(TM)s Short Cuts.

• Aaron Hillis, Village Voice

  If we're meant to take these threads as a tapestry of L.A., then Freeland clearly needs to stop watching Robert Altman DVDs and go outside to see what the real world is actually like.

• David Fear, Time Out New York

  There's neither brilliance nor bite to this look at innocence lost. Next time, go Nathanael West, young man.

• Kam Williams, NewsBlaze

  Paints a convincing, if dizzying picture of Tinseltown as a dangerous den of iniquity that eats away at one's optimism until you capitulate and become just as jaded and hardened as the vultures who have made a career out of preying on the naive and needy.

• Todd Gilchrist, IGN Movies

  Freeland's film offers a poor man's Los Angeles opus.

• Jeff Bayer, The Scorecard Review

  This ensemble piece works if you know Los Angeles. After all, it's very possible for a homeless kid, pot-smoking Realtor, young model and a number of perverts to cross paths in that town.

• Jeffrey M. Anderson, Cinematical

  Sophomore writer/director Freeland doesn't quite feel like the host of this particular "garden party," but rather like the party's Sabrina, secretly spying from the sidelines.

• Amy Nicholson, Boxoffice Magazine

  Oddly, halfway through when Freeland strains our credulity even further, the film finally feels fresh

• Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid

  A bit like Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), taking a look at a cross-section of Los Angeles characters, though it runs less than half the length and, conversely, half the depth.

• Eric D. Snider, EricDSnider.com

  The characters aren't interesting, and the stories toggle between tawdry and ridiculous.

• Sean Axmaker, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  They're not a likeable bunch, to be sure, but the bigger problem is that there's little resonance to their stories.

• Scott Tobias, AV Club

  It's a production in search of a movie.

• Marcy Dermansky, About.com

  Willa Holland is the one good thing about Garden Party -- not because of her performance (which is neither good or bad) but for that nostalgia she evoked in me for young Fairuza [Balk].

• Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

  A dreary drama about a group of selfish and amoral characters whose lives intersect in Los Angeles.

• Geoff Berkshire, Metromix.com

  A blandly pointless roundelay of bad acting, forgettable characters and flat drama.

• Doris Toumarkine, Film Journal International

  A fatally fractured, disconnected mosaic of unappealing, marginal Hollywood types haphazardly interconnecting.

Read all 18 critic reviews