Critic Reviews

• Sam Adams, Los Angeles Times

  A convoluted, discombobulated take on a small-town drama, Lake City shifts gears so often it never gets out of the driveway.

• Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

  With all the high-profile movies blasting into theaters at this time of year, Lake City will probably get lost in the shuffle. That won't be a tragedy.

• Ben Lyons, At the Movies

  An interesting little film.

• Ben Mankiewicz, At the Movies

  A movie that just didn't really ring true.

• Kyle Smith, New York Post

  One of those Deep Dark Secret movies, the dull indie Lake City combines a wholly uninteresting family mystery with a wholly unconvincing crime drama.

• Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News

  Only natural spitfire Spacek, as the pickup-driving mom of the land, feels fresh.

• David Nusair, Reel Film Reviews

  ...ultimately establishes itself as a compelling little drama...

• Paul Brenner, Filmcritic.com

  It is phony, manipulative films like this that make people line up for Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

• Bill White, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  When Hill and Moore leave story and characters behind to veer off into suspenseless chases through cornfields, one wonders if the era of earnest American drama may be coming to a close.

• Josh Rosenblatt, Austin Chronicle

  The only thing saving Lake City from total ridiculousness is Spacek.

• Michelle Orange, L.A. Weekly

  Mother and son have an uneasy bond that should be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a movie in which a child's room has been preserved and locked tight.

• Robert Koehler, Christian Science Monitor

  The astonishingly inept finish could serve as a primer in screenwriting classes on how not to wind up a family drama.

• Wade Major, Boxoffice Magazine

  An intermittently admirable but largely incongruous work that suggests not only divergent sensibilities on the part of the two neophyte filmmakers, but a certain indecisiveness regarding their core audience.

• Cole Smithey, ColeSmithey.com

  "Lake City" is a throwaway film with a cast it doesn't deserve.

• Noel Murray, AV Club

  The movie has an earnest tone, and a burnished golden glow that's pleasing to the eye, but the characters have no life beyond their immediate problems, and the actions the plot requires them to take to resolve them.

• Mark Peikert, New York Press

  All of these movies uneasily coexist under the umbrella title of Lake City, which is a shame because Sissy Spacek can be found wasting a genuinely affecting performance in this mess.

• Donald J. Levit, ReelTalk Movie Reviews

  The filmmakers rely excessively on a repeated dreamlike flashback and on foliage, fields and sunsets to remind us 'we are all part of a greater universe.'

Read all 17 critic reviews