आलोचक समीक्षाएं

It's impressive, how thoughtfully Penn handles this material.

Loose, rambling and sometimes rudderless as it is, The Indian Runner has a fundamental honesty that gives it real substance.

It has weak spots, including bits of mystical mumbo jumbo about a legendary "Indian runner" with a ghostly message. But most of the film is articulate and absorbing.

Though the movie is sometimes too mannered (during one unaccountable stretch, Penn suddenly turns into Diane Arbus and peppers the screen with small-town grotesques), it has an accomplished rhythmic flow, a sense of people’s destinies unfolding step by step.

A tortured examination of the disintegration of a Mid-western family, The Indian Runner is very much actors' cinema. Rambling, indulgent and joltingly raw at times, Sean Penn's first outing as a director takes a fair amount of patience to get through but has an integrity that intermittently serves it well.

In his debut as a writer-director, Sean Penn shows a sure hand with actors and a knack for setting up a scene visually and dramatically. But he’s a bust at following through.

It's an interesting film, with fine acting performances. Penn acquits himself in this project, his first as a behind-the-camera talent, though The Indian Runner never quite establishes an assured rhythm or fluidity.

Potentially potent and not without naive charm, but ultimately a masturbatory ejaculation of all too personal juices.

While [Penn] has all the heavyweight America-gone-sour themes and confused characters found in roadside movies like Five Easy Pieces, Electra Glide In Blue or Thieves Like Us, he misses the eccentric and exciting spikiness that made them more than just gloomfests.

Sean Penn's first film as writer-director, steeped in sullen Method acting, pretentious symbolism, and mannered slow motion, is obviously a sincere and considered effort, but I found it insufferably tedious, self-indulgent, and reeking with self-pity.