All Critics (65)
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Top Critics (18)
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Fresh (36)
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Rotten (28)
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DVD (1)
A loud, grating wallow in dime-store despair.
The film is guilty of reverse sentimentality, where the relentless unhappiness comes to seem as manufactured and artificial as the schmaltz in a romcom.
Detachment gets an A for enthusiasm but a C for execution.
There's something weirdly effective about the artistic desperation, which includes inserts of chalkboard animation and to-the-camera testimonials.
Everywhere you turn in Detachment, someone is trying to make you feel like hell.
Detachment gets to you. It hits hard.
While Adrien Brody gives it his all in his performance, the film suffers greatly from an attempt to equalize its multiple plotlines.
Even a talented director like Tony Kaye (American History X) and a great performance from Brody can't save a mess like this.
Detachment is the sort of film-of-the-week that ought to appeal to anyone who loves movies in the purest sense.
Detachment has such original energy and is so infused with righteous anger that it proves hard to dismiss.
The acting is excellent but the movie is the sort of thing that gives pessimism a bad name.
Despite its title and central theme, Tony Kaye's complicated lament for values abandoned and children betrayed leaves little room for indifference.
Admittedly, the film is heavy-handed in places, but it still makes you sit up and take notice.
Grappling with the dilapidation of America's school system is fair enough, but the movie is painfully undone by its pretentious poetry of despair.
If Detachment is only partially successful, it is still more watchable than most school sagas.
It is pretentious and overbearing at times but passionate.
It is a touch more subtle than X, carrying off the tough trick of being both amusing and depressing.
It's watchable enough, but the bludgeoning screenplay seems undercooked compared to the high-grade actors on show.
Like the recent Margaret it rages against the dying of the light in a country where too many people think the lights are still on.
It's a vaguely elegant brute of a film, but a long way from Kaye's best.
Stylishly directed and sharply written, this is an engaging, if ultimately depressing drama with strong performances from a superb ensemble cast.
Tony Kaye's penchant for piercing filmmaking hasn't gone anywhere.
Incredible performances from the cast, but Detachment is perhaps just too pretentiously depressing for its own good.
It's impossible to take his didactic diatribe as seriously as it takes itself.
Tony Kaye's excellent drama features a killer performance by Adrien Brody.
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