Critics reviews

Twenty years later, American Psycho hasn’t left the culture, because the culture hasn’t left American Psycho. The only difference is that Bateman seems more electable now than he might have been then.

[American Psycho] is the best imaginable film of very difficult material; it doesn't say much more than, "The 80s were shit," but manages exactly to catch the all-surfaces, dazzlingly obsessive tone of the novel, making its points by treating all subjects... with exactly the same pornographic attention to detail as the sex and violence.

Mary Harron's American Psycho (2000) is a lot of things. A satire about the glittering rot of 1980s America. An excellent showcase for Christian Bale's skills as an actor. An adaptation that bests the novel it's based on. But more than anything else the film is a stunning example of the power of the female gaze when it turns its attention to male vanity and violence.

[Harron] has sensibly excised the gratuitous gore at the sick heart of Bret Easton Ellis's yuppie slasher novel, leaving a provocative socio-psychological satire balanced tantalisingly on the cusp of chilly horror and outrageous comedy.

The overall translation of Ellis' book is competent but tame in comparison to the original story's graphic violence. Bale does his best to keep the film completely afloat, but it's not enough to prevent it from losing a degree of energy... Minus these subtle errors, American Psycho is watchable and at times, admirable.

"American Psycho" is partly a full-bodied, punchy thriller, and primarily an excellent character study... Key sequences include comedy and cruelty in equal measure, thus cleverly confusing the audience by insisting on a mixed reaction... [This] is the best monster movie in years.

[Mary Harron] pares down Ellis’s numbing, voluminous cataloguing and, mercifully, also tamps down his goriest passages... [Yet] because [Bale's] monster is deliberately depicted without psychological depth, the movie, for all its fussy pretensions, resembles nothing so much as a classy slasher flick.

Harron and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner do understand [Ellis'] book, and they want their film to be understood as a period comedy of manners... The film rests on the shoulders and taut torso of Bale... [His] dishy anonymity makes him the ideal black hole at the center of this movie. It needs to be seen and appreciated, like a serpent in a glass cage.

[American Psycho] is an uneven movie that nonetheless bristles with stinging wit and exerts a perverse fascination... Harron’s depiction of a shallow Eighties world is far from dated. What's unexpected is the human dimension she brings to Ellis’ characters, notably the women.

[Harron] has smoothed Ellis's sick-puppy writings into something of a slick black comedy. There's nothing beyond the bloodshed and gallows humor, just intellectually secondhand implications about materialism, conformity and misogyny.

[American Psycho] is 100 minutes spent with an unpleasant, unmotivated, disconnected psychopath... who enjoys hacking folks into pieces and storing body parts in a freezer. Which is pretty much 100 minutes too many.

In adapting Bret Easton Ellis's turgid, gory 1991 novel to the screen, the director Mary Harron has boiled a bloated stew of brand names and butchery into a lean and mean horror comedy classic. The transformation is so surprising that when the movie's over, it feels as if you've just seen a magician pull a dancing rabbit out of a top hat.