Shortbus

audience Reviews

, 77% Audience Score
  • Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
    Nice to see human sexuality as part of the larger plot, from a whole individual, to all other combinations of love & sensuality. Some will see this as shocking, while others embrace the openness portrayed here.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    Amazing movie. So authentic. Great stories. And the fact that the majority of the cast was non professional actors is such fun.... I want to Benin this movie!!! When's the sequel filming?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    The real Sex and the City. Oh, and this has one of the greatest opening sequences of all time.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    Various people indulging in, and doing a great deal of navel-gazing about, sex. Maybe you'll find that more interesting than I did.
  • Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars
    Interesting script and overall outline does not measure up to the amateurish acting and direction
  • Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars
    No artistic value except explicit sex.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    its really awkward at parts but it comes down to just pure awful acting that induces shear paralyzing bordum
  • Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
    Warm-hearted and humorous. It becomes disjointed after about an hour. This is because although it's really Sofia's story, the eternally weepy suicidal James steals the show from her, so the sudden happy endings all round are doubly disconcerting. It's the Daily Mail's most hated film of all time (before that, it was Meet the Feebles), so it's essential viewing, Ted!
  • Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
    While Shortbus is sexually progressive and features plenty of colorful LGBT characters, it can't sustain its initial promise and ends up running out of steam, collapsing under the weight of its own empty sentimentality that is rooted in a message that isn't all that profound to begin with. The first forty-five minutes or so are constantly funny and contain genuinely affecting moments, the unsimulated sex scenes refreshing in an industry where it's rare to even see an erect penis, but after it lays the groundwork for what it's trying to say it veers off into some less interesting territory, leaning hard on cheesy, simplistic "free love" lessons and giving way too much screen time to maudlin pseudo-indie/folk singers. It reaches for profundity late in the game and consistently falls short, attempting to juggle commentary on post-9/11 disconnect, fantasy sequences, depressive episodes, and explicit sex scenes without much success before its last-ditch attempt to tie everything up, a sloppy and embarrassingly earnest sing-along that feels disappointingly anti-climatic for a film that initially seemed so self-assured and so willing to resist banal normality.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    After finally deciding to see this movie again, I am reassured that this is in fact my favorite movie ever and am bumping my rating up to the perfect 5 which it has always deserved.