Critic Reviews

• Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

  Seems like the work of a novice, with self-conscious expository passages and emotionally false conversations.

• Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

  To consider Harry and Max as being about incestuous feelings would be shortchanging it, because the film is really about the evolving nature of love and the need to define it.

• Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

  Provocative without being especially thoughtful or credible.

• Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News

  Too superficial to shock or surprise.

• Debra Birnbaum, New York Post

  Director Christopher Munch deftly raises disturbing questions, but he fumbles badly when groping for answers.

• Stephen Holden, New York Times

  There are brave, boundary-breaching movies, and there are mad, foolhardy ones. Harry and Max belongs to the latter breed.

• Brad Slager, Film Threat

  As disturbing and unsettling as the subject matter is what is truly sad is that the performances of the two leads were impressive and they ended up being wasted by the trash content of the script.

• Scott Tobias, AV Club

  Though Williams and Johnson fit comfortably into the European naturalism that's become Münch's stock in trade, they can't quite wriggle out of his high-concept premise and become plausibly real.

• Rob Blackwelder, SPLICEDWire

  ...incest...pedophilia...the film seems to be nothing more than an attempt to affirm a sense of I'm-OK-you're-OK normality for any viewers with such issues in their own lives.

• David Noh, Film Journal International

  You watch this prurient would-be porn, treated with kid-glove 'sensitivity,' in a state of disbelief.

• Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly

  The movie is a congeries of half-formed ideas about pansexuality and other social taboos, but Munch fails to accomplish what he seemingly sets out to do.

• Annlee Ellingson, Boxoffice Magazine

  The blurred boundary between intimacy and sexuality ... isn't broached with the sensitivity and maturity that it demands.

• Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine

  Harry and Max is writer-director Christopher Munch's seemingly candid exorcism of any number of self-consciously naughty fantasies.

• , E! Online

  Chatty scenes ramble on and on, supporting characters are underdeveloped, and all the sibs' angst does little to make their tortured relationship very credible or interesting.

• Ken Fox, TV Guide's Movie Guide

  The film winds up dancing around the 500-lb gorilla in the middle of the room rather than facing the pathology of its real subject head-on.

• David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor

  Intermittently insightful, but a disappointment from the talented Munch.

• Chris Barsanti, Filmcritic.com

  forgets along the way to tell a compelling story.

• Gabriel Shanks, Mixed Reviews

  You can almost hear the filmmakers exhale with nervous relief, having made it through a film about incest without actually having an opinion on the subject.

Read all 18 critic reviews