Critics reviews

Whatever you choose to make of it, Bravo and co-writer/spouse Gelman have crafted something so intentionally and self-reflexively off-putting that I’m still banging my head against the wall trying to figure out if it’s comic gold or just lives up to its title.

[Lemon] is a litmus test for whether watching [Gelman] do his negative creep thing for 90 minutes is your idea of genuinely boundary-pushing, or shock-treatment insightful, or even laugh-worthy.

At its core, Lemon is a send-up of masculine insecurity and pretension — subjects that deserve plenty of satire but aren’t necessarily fun to witness. But if you’re watching an ironic depiction of an immature man behaving abhorrently, at the end of the day you’re still watching an immature man behaving abhorrently.

Reviewing “Lemon” feels like taking a sucker’s bet, treating the film with a reverence it never even asks for.

[In "Lemon"] Bravo demonstrates a raw skill behind the lens suggesting a higher ceiling than most of her peers, though her film is no less awkward than anything they’ve made, either... [The film is] the best, or maybe most vital, presentation of whiteness in theaters in 2017, or for that matter the last half decade or so of pop culture.

["Lemon"] has some legitimately peculiar traits, and moments that flash with true absurdity. But there's a flatness in the end-result. The quirky is utterly predictable.

Partners in life and comedy, Bravo and Gelman demonstrate their uniquely oddball sense of humor in ["Lemon"], directed by Bravo with a supremely assured sense of rhythm and style... [The two] find a transcendent absurdity in the mundane that’s awkwardly enchanting.

[Bravo] is a filmmaker precise in her composition and in her texture, her comedic beats reminiscent of both David Lynch and Issa Rae.

The viewer can’t help but either feel sympathy for the characters in their desperation, or recoil from it, because we’ve all felt it—perhaps just not this painfully. “Lemon” is all about this pull and push, toward and away from the characters and the movie itself. It’s also one of the more original films in recent memory.

["Lemon"] is abundant proof that [Bravo] is capable of turning garden-variety awkwardness into baroque exercises in squirm... It’s the work of a filmmaker who has been honing her own jarring, idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and character for years. As a debut feature, it feels auspicious; as a snapshot of a masculine emergency, it feels timeless.

Lemon remains wholly original throughout, rendering old themes fresh with its bold perspective. It’s also incredibly funny, even when it’s dunking our heads into the darkness of the human psyche.

A miserabilist comedy in the vein of something like Entertainment or The Comedy, it’s satire of the media industry in the first act feels minimally purposeful only in how it mocks the performance process. It’s a strange beast, at once somewhat reductive towards the artistry involved in acting, but simultaneously a product of that very same struggle.