Metacritic reviews

Strongly acted and beautifully photographed (by Virgil Mirano), Spoken Word is a quietly resonant family drama about the tug of old habits and the difficulties of escaping the past.

Spoken Word benefits from an improbably perfect storm of production circumstances: The muscular, balanced script, the brainchild of an unusual alliance between professional poet Joe Ray Sandoval and TV writer William T. Conway, consistently plays to Nunez's strengths.

Filmmaker Victor Nunez pairs evocative locales--beatnik Bay Area, bucolic rural New Mexico--with fleeting asides of poetry (penned by the Santa Fe–based writer Joe Ray Sandoval); these meditative detours both elevate a routine story arc and tap into tangled, twisted familial roots.

The movie is about how he learns to show what's in his heart even when he can't find the spoken words to express his feelings aloud. Under the careful guidance of Mr. Nunez, Mr. Becker does both, in ways that reminded me of a Hispanic James Dean.

Has just enough genuine warmth to compensate for the coolness you might feel toward its generic trappings.

Though crudely constructed (the lighting and framing are strictly soap opera), unevenly acted (Becker is a bundle of distracting tics), and bluntly scripted, the film does have an honest integrity--at least whenever Blades is onscreen.

Spoken Word, which centers on the tense reunion between a recovering addict poet and his dying father, features more cliches than it can comfortably handle and is not helped by its grindingly slow pacing.

Apart from its title, there's very little poetic about Spoken Word.

While in many respects Spoken Word is adequately specific, it's still not very deep.

The self-conscious poetry and Cruz's diagnosis of bipolar disorder threaten to add too many notes to this quiet drama.