Avis Metacritic

Fox is very good in the central role (he has a long drunken monologue that is the best thing he has ever done in a movie). To his credit, he never seems to be having fun as he journeys through club land. Few do, for long. If you know someone like Jamie, take him to this movie, and don't let him go to the john.

It may not capture Mr. McInerney's novel completely or even succeed in standing on its own, but it does go a long way toward bringing the book to life. If Mr. McInerney's readers think it incomplete, they should also find it enjoyably familiar.

An insipid '80s nostalgia piece really, held together by Fox's performance and several neat turns from his support.

A hollow view of hollowness with a very polished surface.

Too bad he's caught in a movie that all too accurately captures the tenor of its time with its slick, superficial, coked-up, money-drunk emptiness.

Fox's performance is surprisingly assured; Sutherland is also convincing as his self-centered, dissipated, and snobbish best friend.

It's hard to care much about Jamie Conway, an aspiring novelist who is dissipating his substance in New York on cocaine and parties: Fox hasn't the range to play anguish, so the explanatory voice-over is less a survival from the best-selling novel than a necessity.

The movie is like a Porsche outfitted with a lawn mower engine; there's not even enough juice to get the machine out of the driveway.

While Bridges is a capital stylist, "Bright Lights" needed a great deal more than style. (Real emotion, for one thing. Believability might also have been nice.) And while Fox is puppyish and charming, his character, Jamie, has to go through a real epiphany during the film's weeklong time frame and Mr. Fox is hard-pressed to suggest a two-Excedrin headache.

This novel-cum-feature film (from Jay McInerney's book) is a distinctly morose and maudlin journey through one man's destructive period of personal loss.